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Episode 163: Joe Balcer, a career retrospective

Pinball Profile·podcast_episode·1h 32m·analyzed·Nov 11, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Pinball Profile interviews Joe Balcer on Oktoberfest, career, and design philosophy.

Summary

Jeff Teolis interviews Joe Balcer, legendary pinball designer, discussing his career retrospective and latest game Oktoberfest. The conversation covers Oktoberfest's gameplay mechanics, production timeline (targeting January 2024 shipment), the company's swift response to offensive artwork backlash, and Balcer's design philosophy emphasizing meaningful shots and flipper skill. The episode also revisits his early work at Data East/Sega including Baywatch and Apollo 13.

Key Claims

  • Oktoberfest was approximately 50-60% code complete at Expo; American Pinball plans to begin production in January 2024 with shipments within a 90-day window

    high confidence · Joe Balcer stated production target date was December initially, now expecting January box production; game shown at Expo with preliminary code

  • American Pinball hired Joe Schober (Highway Pinball rules designer) to work with Josh Sharpe on Oktoberfest rules design to improve competitive playability

    high confidence · Jeff Teolis and Joe Balcer both reference Joe Schober's hiring and his collaborative work on rules

  • Oktoberfest features a dual-button right-side control scheme allowing single-handed play with both flippers accessible from right flipper buttons

    high confidence · Joe Balcer describes the two-button setup; credits Jerry Stahlberg with prior implementation on P3 platform

  • Joe Balcer is making post-Expo design refinements to two playfield areas: the lower scoop and another shot area, with mechanical updates completed and playfield updates planned for the week of interview

    high confidence · Balcer states 'I just finished the mechanical side of it all today' and describes specific shot adjustments based on Expo feedback

  • American Pinball immediately addressed community backlash regarding offensive imagery of a monkey character by halting production and revising artwork

    high confidence · Joe Balcer confirms artwork has been changed, playfield art reviewed and corrected; emphasizes swift response to community feedback

  • Oktoberfest features the tallest steel ramp in pinball, stretching to the top of the back panel and reaching approximately 20 inches without intermediate wire ramps

    high confidence · Balcer describes the left ramp design as his largest, made of stainless steel, and mentions the Houdini catapult shot as a 20-inch throw comparison

  • Raymond Davidson (world #1 ranked player) described Oktoberfest as 'Joe Balser's greatest hits game' with design elements echoing previous Balcer titles

    high confidence · Jeff Teolis cites Raymond Davidson's comment during the interview

Notable Quotes

  • “We may try to play with that and have something set up. If the timing is right, it just might make that shot on its own down the road.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~23:45 — Describes potential future auto-flip feature for upper flipper shots if timing mechanics align; indicates ongoing design iteration

  • “I was contacted early on before the storm basically hit by a couple women in the industry and said, Joe, what did you do here? and that weight got real heavy.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~31:00 — Describes his emotional reaction to discovering the offensive imagery controversy; demonstrates genuine concern for community impact

  • “Change happens, and change is good. And, you know, in our world today, this change is big, and it's a change that is good for society.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~31:30 — Reflects on the company's decision to revise artwork and articulates commitment to social responsibility in pinball design

  • “I try to put in as many shots on the initial layout as I can. One thing I wanted to do was put the Oktoberfest letters on the game. So try fitting 11 targets.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~53:00 — Explains the design constraint-driven approach to incorporating themed letter banks while maintaining shot variety

  • “I'd love to see more of [drop targets], but you start getting into a four, five, six bank drop targets. You're getting into a nice chunk of change on your bill of material, which takes away something else from the game.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~60:00 — Articulates the manufacturing cost tradeoff rationale for preferring stand-up targets over drop targets in game design

  • “I let out a scream that you wouldn't believe. when the eight balls dumped on top of the five balls that were already there.”

    Joe Balcer (quoting woman at arcade) @ ~82:00 — Recounts the moment at Apollo 13 test location when 13-ball multiball debuted, describing the emotional impact on players as validation of the game concept

  • “So when we came up with the eight-ball trough up in the left corner and we had five down in the main trough, it was a matter of how to get them there without interrupting gameplay”

Entities

Joe BalcerpersonJeff TeolispersonJoe SchoberpersonJosh SharpepersonAmerican PinballcompanyOktoberfestgame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: American Pinball rapidly addressed community backlash regarding offensive monkey artwork on Oktoberfest by halting production and revising all artwork

    high · Jeff Teolis and Joe Balcer discuss the community's backlash and American Pinball's immediate response. Balcer states: 'We made a decision to stop it in its tracks. So the artwork has been changed. We're going through our art on the play field, and we're just making it right.' Teolis praises the swift response and community has responded positively

  • ?

    community_signal: Joe Balcer responsive to player feedback; incorporated suggestions from top players like Joe Schober (backhand ramp capability) and implemented changes based on Expo player volume testing

    high · Joe Schober's observation: 'you know that big ramp that you're talking about on the left-hand side? You can actually backhand it.' Balcer received feedback from thousands of players at Expo and is making refinements: 'I got some feedback I know, and it just kind of fell in line with the changes that I saw'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Joe Balcer critiques his own Oktoberfest design post-Expo: 'The game, in my opinion, could be a little better. And there's a couple shots on it that I'm not real comfortable with.'

    high · Balcer states: 'Right now we are all hands on deck to make sure everything's ready for production. The game, in my opinion, could be a little better. And there's a couple shots on it that I'm not real comfortable with.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Joe Balcer's design signature: emphasis on stand-up targets (20+ on Oktoberfest) over drop targets due to cost/BOM tradeoffs and preference for faster-paced gameplay; justifies as cost-efficient while maintaining shot variety

    high · Balcer explains: 'you start getting into a four, five, six bank drop targets. You're getting into a nice chunk of change on your bill of material, which takes away something else from the game. So kind of to balance it out, I think I'd rather have more targets to shoot at'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.272

0:00
it's time now for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff tiolis you can find our group on facebook we're also on twitter at pinball profile emails pinball profile at gmail.com and please subscribe on either itunes stitcher or google play it's a pleasure to be talking to a man who has created a lot of joy for many many years including in my house with some of the greatest games ever made joe balser from american pinball joins us right now hey joe how are you hey jeff doing great how about yourself i'm good and it's really nice to talk to you again we had a great conversation at expo where your latest was released octoberfest and it's a incredibly fun game to play i think i was lucky enough to get four games in and and i say that because you know a lot of times when games come out we're not at full code and by the admission of american pinball this game was i think six out of 14 modes are done and it still was fun well there you go yeah it definitely not a finished code is it 50 there yeah i'll go with probably 50 60 where josh might be now since expo but um it was pretty preliminary but we had time to get a lot of modes done ahead of time getting the help from joe has definitely helped helped us out to move along at a better pace. Well, I was excited when American Pinball hired Joe Schober, who is a great pinball player for one thing, too, but he's done some good work, too, with highway pinball. So bringing a good pinball player on to American Pinball, that can only bode well for the way the game is going to play and certainly the rules involved. You had to be excited as well. Oh, yeah. Once I got to know Joe and more of his background, knowing that he's that type of shooter you know he loves playing he's competitive he's done a lot with our rules from a different point of view you know what i mean so for a rule set to come together the more people that are involved initially to kind of throw out a bunch of ideas and then pick through them to come up with the best rule set to have joe and josh working together now really you could see it evolving at a better pace and the rules are very you know more competitive rules where if you're shooting something you're always shooting to when you make that shot you're accomplishing something there are no shots that mean you know that don't have a lot of meaning to them so it's a it's a pretty good combo that with joe and josh working together now so i'm pretty happy about that that's a good point too because players don't really like those games that have the repeatable shots or the chopping wood aspect too and with Oktoberfest boy you better know your flipper skills because you're going to need it on all of the flippers especially the upper right flipper which has got you know usually an upper right flipper has maybe one maybe two shots there's several up there and they're quite difficult I'll say that yeah yeah the upper flipper shots unless it's a wide open ramp area or a wide open shot they're tough people aren't used to the angles it takes a little time to pick up on the angles of the shots, where it's at on the flipper, the speed of the ball coming around. One thing we try to help there, which has been done on many other pins, is to set up the ball for the shot. So we have a magnet above it that you can set that ball up so you can control the speed as it's coming to the flipper. We could do that in code. And obviously, I don't know if you've known or seen that we added a manually controlled button below the right flipper button that controls the magnets also so you can help set your shots up to make those upper shots definitely more makeable and more doable than on just flying the ball through a loop and trying to catch it at that speed well i did like that effect i certainly enjoyed that the magnets were there one thing i noticed i thought okay this is going to make it really easy maybe it's going to be like roller games it's going to put it right on there one two three flip the magnets help but it doesn't make it easier because you still have to have that timing involved, you know, when it puts it just above the right upper flipper. And I thought that was very, very cool that we're going to make it easier for you, but we're not going to gift wrap it exactly. I thought that was cool. Yeah, it's not an auto flip or anything. We may try to play with that and have something set up. If the timing is right, it just might make that shot on its own down the road. Who knows? You talked about those flippers on the right-hand side, something, you know, you've done this a few times. You've done things that we've never seen before. And here we have, on the right-hand side, we have two buttons, so you can play one-handed. The joke was, yeah, you can drink a beer in the left hand. I just thought that was so cool, and that's going to come up in some kind of unique challenges, some pinball Olympics. Sometimes we see people play with boxing gloves on, or now we're going to have challenges where, yeah, you've got to play with the right hand only. That's cool. Yeah, it'll be a mode in the game. you can set your game to play the two-button mode for both flippers on the right side. It's not a first. Jerry Stahlberg did it on one of his games with his new platform. P3? Yeah, I believe it's in the P3. Don't quote me on that because you'd have to ask Josh. I think Josh knows a little bit more about it because someone was quoted as saying that it was a first in pinball, where I don't think it really was. So Jerry has something to do with it, with the mode and his game. But integrating it into Oktoberfest, yeah, that's kind of a fun thing. When Josh told me about it, I nearly fell back a little bit because it's like, okay, here you go. Now we're starting to add some stuff to this game that has a little bit more meaning towards the Oktoberfest theme. It definitely works for sure. And I've played the P3 game before, the Lexi Lightspeed. I don't recall that. Maybe I'm just not good enough, but maybe it was another P3 platform that I haven't seen. Well, we'll get to this now because I want to talk about your great career and things. And recently, Oktoberfest has come into the news. But I want to say that I talked to a bunch of players and the news is about the backlash and certainly the concern that was there with the monkey doing inappropriate things to a couple of women. American Pinball almost immediately listened, addressed the issue and said they are going to correct it. And to me, as I've told other players, I said, look, we all make mistakes. We all do things we wish we didn't do. The key in life is when you make a mistake, you own it immediately. And American Pinball has done that. And I think the feedback has been very positive that, wow, they listened to us. They're going to do something about this. And you know what? Let's forgive and move forward. And I got to say, I don't know what it was like in the office for you when this happened, because I'm sure it was upsetting. Here's your new baby that's come out, and it's got a great buzz from Expo. And then this is a bit of a setback. But I hope you and everyone at American Pinball feel good that, you know what, we've owned it, and we're moving forward. And I think we're going to be forgiven for this. Well, that's exactly what we hope for. You know, I was contacted early on before the storm basically hit by a couple women in the industry and said, Joe, what did you do here? and that weight got real heavy. And it wasn't as though we wanted to put something out that was offensive. It wasn't as though we wanted to put something out that was degrading or any of the negative that was put out there because of it. But as soon as that came back to us, we made a decision to stop it in its tracks. So the artwork has been changed. We're going through our art on the play field, and we're just making it right. You know, there's a shift that needs to happen. Change happens, and change is good. And, you know, in our world today, this change is big, and it's a change that is good for society. It's good for the American people. It's good for the world. We need to watch what we're doing. You know, pinball has been a little lenient, lenient over the years, not even a little, but that's not the pinball that we design these days. So, you know, our packages will, we will take into consideration that first and foremost. And like I said, we've cleaned up the issue on our end, and you'll just see it in the new package. It has all of that removed. So I feel good about it. the company feels good about it. And I hope our customer base, like you said, can forgive us for this. We did try to jump on it and rectify it as quickly as we could. And that's the best we could do. And we hope that that's enough for our customer base. I think you're going to come out of this okay because, again, the speed of the reaction from American and just hearing you say, you know, we've got to change and change is good. I think a lot of people are going to really be excited by this machine and what moves forward with American Pinball. So good on you and the company for that. The game itself, we want to talk about how this thing shoots. I'm looking forward to playing it again. So I guess the question is production. When do we expect to see these out in the public, at the arcades, in our homes? Is there a target date we're looking at right now? Yeah, there sure is. There's been a target date from when we drew the first line. We did want to make it to Expo with it being Oktoberfest themed. Right now we are all hands on deck to make sure everything's ready for production. The game, in my opinion, could be a little better. And there's a couple shots on it that I'm not real comfortable with. So we went back in two areas on the play field I'm going to be updating. The shots will mean more. The shots will be easier to shoot at. you won't get a lot of rejections out of them the lower scoop is that what you're talking about scoop is one of them because the lower scoop you know you you have to have some power on that right flipper to make the left ramp and by doing that the shot right next to it is a scoop so if you're nailing that straight on your chances of it sticking were a lot lower than i expected so So I'm doing some physical changes there to make that a better shot. And another area of play field, we're just making it a better shot with more meaning. I just finished the mechanical side of it all today as far as the parts that need to be updated. This week I'll have the play field updated and get that out. And, you know, we're shooting for, there's some electronic things that our EEs are trying to get into this game, have been working on it for quite a while. It looks as though our target date was for starting the box games in December. And I'm thinking there's still a possibility of that, but I'm thinking more like we're starting the box and ship in January. So that's our goal. So we're out and we show it in October, November, December, January. Within a 90-day window, we're shipping games. Joe, obviously you took some feedback from Expo too and a lot of plays there. I mean, I know those three games that we saw on the floor there were really rushed to get to that point. I think it's safe to say they weren't even available a week before Expo. It's pretty safe to say, yeah. So here we are. We've had thousands of play on it at Expo, and you've already seen a few things, and you're going to make some adjustments. So I'm fine with that 90-day window to some of those people out there like, oh, I want it right now. Well, don't you want it right before you get it? Yeah, it'll be a better game. Once you play it again, it'll be a better game. There's no doubt. A couple things that I wanted to do that we just didn't have time to, the magic word we use in engineering to tweak it. The pinball fix word is tweak. So we really didn't have a lot of time to tweak some of the shots to make them better. They're there, but they need to be better. And we don't want to put something out that comes back and says, the ball's not sticking on this, I'm not making the shot, or why did you go here when it could have been a better shot? So I think some of the feedback I got from some of the players I know, and it just kind of fell in line with the changes that I saw to enhance the game. So that's where we're at. Owners have bought into what I want to do and where we want to take the game. It's not a big overhaul of the game, but it's enough to, you know, a couple of weeks of putting this thing back together again and then ready to go. So we feel better about it. We've already got some of the sample shots and that on our whitewood that we're shooting. So we know the differences and we know that it feels better. It's a better shooting game for it. Again, I already like the way it shoots. I love the way the play field looks. It's so good. I love the wire form on the right-hand side. When you decided to do that, I assume it was to maybe slow down the ball, but what was your thought process in that great right wire form? We wanted to have a roller coaster on the game because once we were going through what we wanted to do to bring this Oktoberfest theme out, a lot of guys you know talk about Oktoberfest, and it's all about pretty women and drinking beers and getting sloppy and stupid, but that's not the true meaning in what Oktoberfest is. It's a big family party. I've talked to people that, I actually talked to people at Expo that just came from Oktoberfest in Munich. we're in the right place on how we brought out Oktoberfest. So to want to do a roller coaster on a game, obviously there's a lot in the ramping. You know, that's going to make it or break it. So you've got to give the players something that maybe you just haven't seen or something that doesn't even look like it might work until you get to that shot. The left ramp, it's really in orbit. And then if you look at that ramp, it's the biggest, it's the tallest steel ramp I can put in a game. It goes to the top of the back panel. So I stretched it out far enough forward that making it out of stainless steel, the ball will climb and get through that shot. That was kind of what I like to do with the layouts is try to put a shot on the game or a feature on the game that I'm stepping over the safe limit. I'm stepping over that line that says you probably shouldn't put that in the game. You probably should lower that ramp. You probably shouldn't try to throw a pinball 20 inches without a wire form ramp between that and its target and think you're going to be accurate. So I'm talking about the Houdini shot throwing a catapult 20 inches into the box. But the ramp, that's a big ramp. You won't see a bigger ramp on a game. And it shoots like butter. So to drop it off into a roller coaster style ramp, you only have so much real estate to work with on a pinball. We all know that. And you only have certain heights to work with. So I tried to put in as many horizontal loops as I could. and we were looking to do something else in the middle of that ramp that just I couldn't get our vendor. We didn't have enough time to make it happen, so we went into that zigzag back and forth in the ramp. So that ramp, the ball slows down, but it's a pretty cool visual to watch the ball follow those wires because it's bigger wires for the main wire and they're spread out, So the ball kind of slows down and runs through the whole ramp. It goes through that zigzag and comes back into another horizontal loop. And it just felt really good. And when the vendor came in with the first one and we mounted it and it worked, there was a lot of fist pumps going on at that point. So at least we knew we were going in the right direction. Definitely fun, definitely rewarding. And you talked earlier about the strong flippers. You know, Joe Schober told me, he said, you know that big ramp that you're talking about on the left-hand side? You can actually backhand it. And I said, come on, really? I did it. He wasn't lying. So strong flippers, a fun shot, and there are several there. Of course, the big auto head, Raymond Davidson, who's the number one player in the world, said, you know, when he first played this game, he said, it's Joe Balser's greatest hits game, which is the nicest compliment because, you know, he said there are so many things that remind him of some other Joe Balser games. And we're going to get into those games in a bit. But, you know, the Otto head certainly reminds you a little bit of Homer Simpson a little bit. And I was talking to Matt Kern about the voices, and I thought it was interesting with the sound. And I think he got some feedback, too, that he's in love with the voiced Otto. And I agree. He's a great, great voice actor and does great call-outs. He struggles with, are we going to get an authentic German person to do it or an authentic German person to coach the person voicing? And that was kind of a good point, too, because you want it to be as authentic as possible. But you also have a little bit of creative license. You look at where this game is going to be sold in, for the most part, probably in North America, I would assume. And the music that we hear, we hear some rock music. And there is some rock music at certain Oktoberfests, maybe not the authentic one in Germany. But again, that's part of the creative license. I'm okay with it because I don't want to hear polka nonstop. I don't want to hear the accordion. And sorry to Weird Al fans, but I like the mix of the rock music. Yeah, and that kind of went from day one. We wanted to kind of pump it up with some good kind of driving rock music. It started to come together, and then I gave Matt a call and said, you know what, let's start doing some accordion riffs in there. And he said, what? And I'm like, just try it. Let's take some accordion riffs and mix it in with the rock sound. and he did one heck of a job and now he's pretty happy with what he did so you know some of the die-hard oktoberfest people that were talking to me at the show or some emails that i've gotten that it's not as authentic as it should be and we get that but like you said you know we do have the traditional sounds and music in there when you get into certain modes but we're going to have for multiball we're going to have more of a driving rock sound to it we just wanted to kind of pump it up and give it a little bit extra and kind of take away from the not take away from but to add to the kind of band music that is more traditional that I'm sure out in Munich or at a lot of Oktoberfest events Fine by me. I certainly enjoyed the sounds of the game and, as we've said, the playing of the game. How many stand-ups do you have on this game? Oh, boy, the stand-ups are... It's over 20. Yeah, because you have Oktoberfest, and then we have Prost.

  • Oktoberfest contains over 20 stand-up targets, including 11 letters spelling 'OKTOBERFEST' and 16 targets spelling 'PROST'

    high confidence · Joe Balcer confirms 'in the 20s' total, with specific breakdown of themed letter banks

    • Joe Balcer @ ~78:30 — Details the engineering innovation for Apollo 13's complex multiball loading system, highlighting technical problem-solving in 1990s pinball design

  • “It started to be a lot of fun for me. And, you know, once you're going to work and it's fun, it's not so much work anymore.”

    Joe Balcer @ ~70:00 — Reflects on his career pivot point at Data East when pinball design became his passion rather than work

    • Raymond Davidson
    person
    Matt Kernperson
    Jerry Stahlbergperson
    Data East / Segacompany
    Baywatchgame
    Apollo 13game
    Richie Richgame
    Valley Midwaycompany
    Premier Technologycompany
    Joe Kamenkowperson
    John Borgperson
    Jim Lovellperson
    P3 platformproduct
    Pinball Profileorganization
  • $

    market_signal: Themed letter bank strategy: Oktoberfest 11-letter bank and Prost 16-letter bank integrated into stand-up target design; Balcer preferred continuous single bank for mechanical simplicity but split design for layout constraints

    medium · Balcer: 'If it was up to me, I would have made it one continuous 11-bank target to shoot at, or 11-target bank, I should say, to shoot at, but that way we split it up at the lower part of the play field.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Joe Schober (Highway Pinball rules designer and competitive player) hired by American Pinball to collaborate with Josh Sharpe on Oktoberfest rules, improving competitive playability

    high · Jeff Teolis: 'I was excited when American Pinball hired Joe Schober, who is a great pinball player for one thing, too, but he's done some good work, too, with highway pinball.' Balcer confirms collaborative benefit: 'having joe and josh working together now really you could see it evolving at a better pace and the rules are very you know more competitive rules'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Oktoberfest features playfield shot design emphasizing meaningful shots with no wasted/repeatable shots; upper flipper magnets provide optional ball positioning assistance without auto-flip to maintain difficulty

    high · Balcer: 'one thing we try to help there, which has been done on many other pins, is to set up the ball for the shot. So we have a magnet above it that you can set that ball up so you can control the speed as it's coming to the flipper' but 'It's not an auto flip or anything'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Oktoberfest production timeline: targeting January 2024 start of box production with shipments within 90-day window; game was approximately 50-60% code complete at Expo with continued development

    high · Joe Balcer: 'our target date was for starting the box games in December. And I'm thinking there's still a possibility of that, but I'm thinking more like we're starting the box and ship in January. So that's our goal. So we're out and we show it in October, November, December, January. Within a 90-day window, we're shipping games'

  • ?

    product_concern: Post-Expo design refinements to lower scoop and playfield shot areas to improve ball sticking and shot makability

    high · Joe Balcer states he's updating two playfield areas: 'the lower scoop you know you have to have some power on that right flipper to make the left ramp and by doing that the shot right next to it is a scoop so if you're nailing that straight on your chances of it sticking were a lot lower than i expected' and has completed mechanical updates with playfield updates planned for the following week

  • ?

    technology_signal: Oktoberfest features innovative dual-button right-flipper control scheme enabling single-handed play; credited to Jerry Stahlberg's P3 platform design philosophy

    high · Balcer describes: 'we have a manually controlled button below the right flipper button that controls the magnets also so you can help set your shots up' and later clarifies this enables play with 'two buttons, so you can play one-handed'. Credits Jerry Stahlberg: 'I think it's in the P3' for prior implementation

    • 19:57
    So Prost is 16. You got 17, 8. Yeah, there's in the 20s. I'm not exactly... Exactly. I mean, I should have been prepared for that question.
    20:11
    My point is, stand-ups seem to be almost a Joe Balser signature. Is that safe to say? I look at Wizard of Oz, there's over 20 there. A few of your games have a lot, and I'm fine with it. That's one way to quickly say, oh, that's a Balser game. Yeah, I don't know if that's... I think it's inherent to the designs.
    20:31
    You know, Starship Troopers had drop targets. You know, if we could use drop targets as a designer everywhere, I think I would, just because of the mechanical aspect of drop targets. But when it comes down to space that you have, real estate that you have, and the cost you're trying to keep a game down under, the stand-up target serves its purpose. You're going to hit the target, you're going to score. It's not dropping out of your way, which I'd love to see more of, but you start getting into a four, five, six bank drop targets. You're getting into a nice chunk of change on your bill of material, which takes away something else from the game. So kind of to balance it out, I think I'd rather have more targets to shoot at than not, I guess, would be a way to put it.
    21:29
    Well, let me tell you something from a player's perspective. I know that, let's say Stern, for example, you know, if you get a pro model, they're probably got a lot of stand-ups. And then if you go to a premium, you'll see more drop targets. From a player's perspective, I'm actually more a fan of the stand-ups. And the reason is it makes the game go faster. I'll use an example like ACDC, pro versus premium. The premium plays a lot slower because of the drop targets. Whereas they bounce off the ACVC and the Let There Be Rock side and the TNT. It makes the game go a lot faster. So I'm totally fine with the stand-ups. I don't think anybody's looking at Wizard of Oz and going, boy, I wish those were drop targets. Not a chance. You know what I mean? So if you can get more in, if you can keep the cost down, I don't care. My whole comment about the stand-ups were there are a lot of them.
    22:24
    But that means there's a lot more things to shoot. And you know what? You don't want wasted shots. You don't want repeatable shots. You look at the play field of Oktoberfest and you look at what you can do on the right flipper I looking Okay there the Oktoberfest there the ramp there the scoop You can go up the middle You can hit the stand on the right side You can backhand that up ramp. There's a lot you can do. That's just one flipper. Same on the other side. Same with the upper flipper. That's what makes Oktoberfest a fun shooting game. Well, thanks. I try to get as many shots on the initial layout as I can. One thing I wanted to do was put the Oktoberfest letters on the game. So try fitting 11 targets.
    23:10
    So that's where the circular banks came from, just to fit in Oktober and Fest. If it was up to me, I would have made it one continuous 11-bank target to shoot at, or 11-target bank, I should say, to shoot at. but that way we split it up at the lower part of the play field. You know, there's 11 separate shots with 11 separate targets. So it's got its advantages. It's not as mechanical as I would like them to be, but like you said, it does make a faster-paced game. That's for sure. Oktoberfest has 11 letters, and you've got 11 stand-ups for that, and you had to do that. It's a good thing you weren't working on Thunderbirds with International Rescue and having to spell that out. exactly that'd be a bigger bank it doesn't matter this is a fun fun game and i want to talk about some of your other games too and how you got started into pinball which was really with richie rich you made one game one game for aaron spelling right and that's really that was just a remake or a kind of a a retread of another of another game you know what had happened back then is that our engineering department got a call from, and don't quote me on how this exactly happened, but I remember Joe Camico ran our engineering department, called everybody together and said, we just got a phone call from Mrs. Erin Spelling that she wanted a custom pinball machine for her husband, a man that has everything. We'd like a custom pinball machine. And Joe threw a number out there, whatever that number might have been. It was pretty large. And she said, who do I write the check to? By the way, as a guy who does sales for a living, if you throw out a big price and someone says, okay, you made a mistake, you should have made the number bigger. Yeah, that's probably true because that's kind of the way Joe put it where I threw a price out there and she said, who do I write the check to? So that's kind of where the Richie Riches, Aaron Spelling, a couple of the other one-offs that we did. It was just put a new artwork package in, play with the rules a little bit, and make these people happy. And that's kind of how that came about. So that was with Data East, which quickly became Sega. And then your first crack at a new game, and you had a licensed theme in Baywatch, too. So let's go back to Baywatch, a game that has a couple of video modes. The first thing I noticed was, hey, you can put six players on this. That's kind of cool. Tell us your thoughts of Baywatch and the early days of Sega. Well, Baywatch was the first full-size pinball I was assigned to layout. And, you know, we got to go a little crazy with that. A lot of ramping, a lot of misdirection with the ball. So it just felt good laying that game out and then watching it being built and come up to speed and everything working. You know, when I was hired at Data East, Joe Chemical brought me in. I had been, you know, my whole career kind of started out at Valley Midway way back in the early 80s. I kind of jumped through and went over to Wicco for a game there. and then that kind of shut down and looking around. And I ended up at Premier Technology for, I don't know, five, six years at Premier, seven years. And then ended up at Data East, and Joe brought me in, and that's where I had my opportunity to start to learn design. He had a real, I don't know, a real passion for what pinball design was about, and I was able to kind of take that all in with the crew that we had there and to be a lead, you know, to be lead design on a game. Obviously, I had three or four guys working with me at the time, you know, to do some of the mechanics and things there. But, you know, that first layout, that first lines and circles that turns into, you know, a full 3D pinball was an amazing feeling for me. And it just, you know, it got me at that point. So it started to be a lot of fun for me. And, you know, once you're going to work and it's fun, it's not so much work anymore. So that kind of started it all out with laying out pinballs. Started out with the Baywatch team. And it's got to make you feel good that your first baby, as far as people are concerned and as far as voting matters on something like Pinside, still in the top 100. So your first game out of all the games made is still received very, very well. And I enjoyed the game. I find the shark flipper difficult. I can't nail that thing. I should probably just let it do it by itself. But that was unique. What was your thought behind that kind of almost reverse thing flips flipper? Yeah, I don't know. We were messing with that area of the play field and ended up working this small flipper out that shot, and one of the shots went right across the play field. and we found that we could control it. So once we started to get that down, it just became this automatic flip. You know, where it really came from, you know, who really knows? That goes back a few years. So, you know, it's probably just something that was, you know, unique to what we were doing at the time, and it just stuck. Let's go on to the next game. and, you know, if you've ever played hyperball, you go, wow, that's a lot of balls, but they're little balls. Well, you've got big balls and you've got a lot of them. Apollo 13. Joe, you wanted to be the big guy on campus with that crazy multi-ball, didn't you? Tell us about that game you made along with John Borg and, again, Joe Kamenkow. Right.
    29:23
    Amazing to be able to stage that many pinballs and control it. That was the main issue with the game was how do we load and reload pinballs? So programming, so who's coding the game knows where those balls are at all times. So when we came up with the eight-ball trough up in the left corner and we had five down in the main trough, it was a matter of how to get them there without interrupting gameplay to try to load, and by going up over the top of the shooter lane and back around and then having basically a diverter at the top of the play field that would either load the balls into the eight-ball trough or let the balls go back into play at the top lanes. Once we got that down and it was consistent, then it was off to the races. We can make this happen. And when we went out on test with that game, you kind of get real cozy with a pinball, working it through all of its stages, you know, getting it to shoot, making your tweaks, making things better. And then you're finally ready to go out on test. And we brought Apollo to one of the arcades that we were working with as a test location.
    30:45
    And, you know, I'll never forget, we were sitting there, we put the game up, and this woman and her son walked up to the game to play it while I was there. And we had set it where the 13-ball multi-ball was just one shot away on the next ball in the next game. And when she hit that shot, she let out a scream that you wouldn't believe. when the eight balls dumped on top of the five balls that were already there. It is total chaos to begin with. There's no controlling that. It's just flipping away, flailing away as much as you can to keep the balls from draining.
    31:27
    But when that happened, she let out a scream. Her son started crying. The whole thing went up for grabs.
    31:37
    And I even to this day kind of forget who was there with me. but you knew you had something special when that happened. I still have my Apollo from when it was new. I was lucky enough to be able to deliver a game to Jim Lovell's house. And, you know, I have a game that my back glass is signed and Saturn V rocket is signed by Mr. Lovell, Jim Lovell. So, you know, some of the things that happen in pinball, you'd never think that I'd have a machine here that was signed by Jim Lovell, the astronaut that's a part of Apollo 13. And just we were able to go out to the debut of the game out in Hollywood. We spent some time at an after party. All these things that just were part of pinball back in the 90s. Just had a total fun with that game. It's the first game that my name is in the back glass. If you ever see an Apollo, look at the name tag on the main astronaut, and it's Rec Lab. It just kind of works out as kind of a space-themed name as Rec Lab, but that's just balser backwards. So it was kind of fun. Jeff Bush, who I worked on Houdini and Oktoberfest at American Pinball, did the art for Apollo 13, and then we ended up putting my name in there, only it's backwards. So it's kind of a cool little innuendo thing that I have for Apollo 13. But great game. I'm looking forward to beating it with 14 balls one of these days. I'm hoping that happens. 14 balls, my goodness. Well, anyway, a nice Easter egg there in Apollo. Let's go to Space Jam. Space Jam is a game. It took me forever to find one of these. I finally got to see one at a place you're familiar with, Vancouver Flipout, last year. And I know you were there this year. Tell me some of your thoughts about making Space Jam. Again, just a fun theme. Joe Camico, who was getting, you know, setting up all of our licenses, talked about Space Jam and this movie coming up, which we didn't know anything about. But once we got into seeing parts of the movie, reading what it was going to be about, it's time to make a really cool basketball-themed game. You know, one of the main shots on the game, off the right flipper or even off the left flipper, is a shot up to the upper left corner where the ball jumps on a steel ramp. I put a magnet on a basketball backboard, and when it jumps off the ramp, the magnet grabs it and does a little slam dunk on the basket. And it turns out to be a really satisfying shot, especially when you can hit them over and over. You know, the game is just a funny, fun game with a fun theme. I just picked one up just recently. I only have four games in my collection. I've had many more at one time in my life, but you go through a couple of divorces and a few pinball machines. Kind of disappeared. But I just picked up another Space Jam that was shopped. It's in beautiful shape. It's a fun game to play. We had a lot of fun putting that one together. Got to meet Michael Jordan. Got to go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation when Michael Jordan was a big part of it. Met Patrick Ewing, who is a very, very large man. Never thought I would be that connected. but it was just fun being a part of pinball and being a part of all these different events also because of games you did so another fun game to do so it's got to be very exciting when you get some of these licensed themes and you're like wow space jam maybe i'll meet jordan sure enough you met michael jordan and you talked about the apollo 13 and i know some of the baywatch cast came out and signed some autographs too so when you got the next one star wars trilogy were you shaking in your boots. I mean, that's something that's near and dear to my heart. Yeah, we had some real nice ideas for that one. It had to be done fairly quickly. I think that year I did Star Wars Trilogy and Starship Troopers back-to-back, I believe. There was a time, I believe it was those two games that were back-to-back. So I was real busy.
    36:13
    Having a theme like Star Wars Trilogy, where there's a lot of IP. There's a lot to work with on the programming side, on the visual side. That game really came together nicely. We had a couple of really neat toys on it that worked out. Fun game to do. The license themes were, that's all we were doing then. And you get a lot of content with license themes, but then there are walls up around you with license themes too. You have to do the things the right way to get approved.
    36:49
    And Star Wars Trilogy, being part of the whole Star Wars internationally, you really had to do things right for them. So love doing a game, a lot of fun. And I had drop targets on that one, so there you go.
    37:05
    Hey, Joe, we've heard some of the people talk about the current Star Wars game from Stern and some of the difficulties with the artwork and what can be done and what can't be done. Was that what it was like back when your Star Wars trilogy was made, or was it a lot easier than what you've heard? Well, it went with the theme. It went with whatever that license might be. There could be one or two actors in there that become really picky about their likenesses. There could be aspects within the movie that the art that's done has to be spot on. And if it doesn't look right or it's not scaled right or it's not fitting that area right, meaning it's too big or it's too small, you'll hear everything. Licensors have a way to, they can dictate because it's their property. So you're trying to serve them and be right with them, and sometimes it takes a few iterations to get to the point where you get that stamp of approval. And that goes with any license, really. Well, Star Wars Trilogy was kind of the first time I noticed, boy, Joe Balser games have some really cool toys with the moving X-Wing fighter, and you definitely know that about the next game, and you mentioned it, Starship Troopers with the bugs. Toys are pretty important to you, aren't they? Yeah, and at the time, toys, the one thing, we didn't have to do a lot of custom toys. I think the industry looks for the custom toys now. Back then, we would work with toy manufacturers.
    38:47
    We would get catalogs or samples of everything that was coming out for Starship Troopers or everything that was coming out for the next Star Wars movie or for Space Jam or whatever. So we would have a relationship with the toy manufacturers, and we would get all these samples to try to adopt them to the game. Starship Troopers is a real good example of that because there are a lot of toys on there, but those were not toys that we didn't sculpt. They weren't custom. They weren't custom made. We bought them in bulk, and we fit them to mechanisms. But on Starship Troopers, it was a lot of ready-made toys that we built into the game. Let's just put it that way. Well, you had to build a toy for the next game, Godzilla, the big Godzilla head. That's a game that I think I've noticed a lot more nowadays. People are saying, you know, that's a fun game. That's a fun game. A lot of multi-balls, a lot of different ways to win, a lot of good shots. You've got to be happy seeing some of these older games. and Godzilla being an example of, wow, they're really standing the test of time. Yeah, especially, you know, we went in with the mindset on Godzilla to make more of a street, kind of a street version, street-friendly game where you didn't have a lot of mechanisms on it, not a lot of things to fail or to maintain, just one big, gigantic green ramp. And it turned out to be a pretty good shooting game. I do get a lot of good comments on Godzilla, and here we are 20 years later, that people do enjoy shooting Godzilla. It was made more for a downsized game, even though it looks loaded because of the big Godzilla head and the hand coming out of the back panel. It's really just one big gigantic green ramp that takes up a lot of the space as you look at the game. but when you flip that game open there's not a lot going on you know what I mean so it was made for a different market but the movie didn't do all that great so the game and I won't say that it's because of the movie but a lot of times the game doesn't do the numbers you thought it would because the movie didn't do the numbers you thought it would you know so So that might be a good example of that. Yeah, I guess if you've got something that's unknown with a movie like Starship Troopers, you really are hoping the box office, the critics, everything go well. With something like Star Wars, you already know the success of that. So when you worked on South Park, South Park was still kind of pretty new back in 1999 when that game came out. But that game was so popular in the remaining arcades that were around in 99, That really hurt other companies. I've heard other people talk about how South Park was the death of maybe some other games, some other companies. Yeah. It came out in 99. We had a blast putting it together. There's parts of the game that are just right over that line. It's the first and more than likely the last game that has a talking poop on the play field. with Mr. Hankey popping out of a toilet and also Mr. Hankey on the play field. It was kind of a joke, kind of funny, when you go to your plastics house that's doing your inserts and you ask them if you could do inserts in brown. And they don't know anything about South Park. They're just answering questions, and they're like, brown? Yeah, we need inserts in brown. It has to be translucent, but we're looking for brown. and they pulled it off. And the game is just, you know, if you're a South Park fan, it's a fun game. It's easy rules. The one thing that I always bought into back in the 90s, you know, working with Joe was to make games, you know, easier. Not easier, but just you understand it. You see a flashing light, you shoot it. It builds. You can go through a game. You can learn a game. A game becomes more fun for the player once the player starts to learn the shots and learns how he's going to be rewarded for those shots. So South Park came at a time when, you know, the Pinball 2000 platform was being released. I thought they did one hell of a job on the Pinball 2000 platform. You know, you pretty much use the glare on the glass for an advantage. And it was brilliant, I thought. But, you know, I guess, you know, you're sitting with shareholders that own your company. Bottom line is we're losing money, whatever that is. We're going to go in a different direction. I wouldn't say that South Park killed any games or companies, but it was at that time when it did well. And that's when we used to always check PlayMeter and all the coin-op magazines for the number one ratings. and South Park became a number one. We were the small guy at Sega, but when we got to number one ratings, we had a little party. It was time to kind of fist pump people and have some fun with it. So South Park just came at a time when it was a fun game. The TV show was just starting to pick up and we just had a blast doing it. The game was number one for a lot of arcades, arcades yet it wasn't enough for Sega yeah that was the last game ever made for Sega so as Sega became stern you're on to your next game and it's a quick turnaround too from South Park to Striker Extreme and Oren Day was recently on the Slam Tilt podcast somebody you've worked with many times and he said that originally was going to be Oktoberfest you had an idea to do Oktoberfest way back then. I assume that's true. Yes, it is true. Jeff Bush and myself were working on a theme an Oktoberfest game Had a full layout for it and as I was showing the game and the ideas behind it Gary Stern came back and said that we really needed a soccer game What can we do with this to save it and make it happen as a soccer-themed game? So like Oktoberfest that I just did with API, although I flipped design, I've added things, changed things but the basic idea if you think about Striker Extreme what a goalie is at Striker Extreme that's where the bartender lived and you know you'd knock down the bar in front of them to get to the bartender. It was done with a drop target bank roll over drop target bank and then that just evolved into Striker Extreme one of the things about an Oktoberfest theme game that we would hear is, you know, how do you sell Oktoberfest in June or pick a calendar date outside of October? So it made me think about it, you know, okay, well, you know, all we want to do to esteem this thing as a party type of pinball machine. So that's why we kind of taglined Oktoberfest with our new one as pinball on tap but yes it did start out as an Oktoberfest themed game but um you know it evolved into a striker extreme the bartender turned into a goalie and uh you know everything else kind of fell in fell in place John Norris had resigned from Stern and you took over High Roller Casino one of Bruce Nightingale's favorite games uh what was that like you've done it since taking over from someone else what's it like doing that when you've got another design there what did you have to do and and how difficult was that well when john had left the game was slated as one of the next games up in production and when uh we looked at it in engineering you know there were some issues with the layout mechanically just kind of the way the ball flowed the way things were working um on the initial layout that we saw some issues as a group and said, you know what, let's keep the design and let's just start it from the bottom up and let's clean it up for production. So that's pretty much what my job was. I worked on the slot machine. I did the mechanics on that. So there were some parts of it that I was actually involved with while John was still with us. But then when he moved on, I just kind of got appointed, hey, let's get this thing ready for production. That's kind of how that came together. so I can't really take credit for that as being my layout it was one that was handed to me let's clean this thing up and get it ready for production you did NFL which was really the same layout as Striker Extreme so the next kind of original layout is Joe, my favorite game I've ever owned and it will never ever ever leave my house unless I'm moving with it The Simpsons Pinball Party this is a game, we were talking about this at Expo because you and Keith Johnson were there and the three of us were talking about this classic game that has all kinds of great toys. It has amazing call-outs. It's a licensed theme that I'm guessing was easy to work with because of those great call-outs and just the great package that it is. What was it like working with the Fox team for the Simpsons Pinball Party? We really spent a good amount of time on trying to get the elements right, to have the couch, to have the beginning of every episode where you go into the house and you end up on the couch. To have Itchy and Scratchy in there, to have the Quickie Mark, to have, boy, it just keeps going on. Obviously, you know, Homer had to be in there. Obviously, you had to have, you know, the Simpsons characters. You know, you tried to get as many into the game as you could. Fun, fun game to put together, obviously. Had a great time doing it. Just because of the theme, I wasn't a big Simpsons follower, Simpsons fan with the TV show. But once I got into watching episodes, Keith Johnson is just a huge Simpsons guy. He had a lot that he wanted to put into the game. You know, there were elements of the first Simpsons pinball that we still wanted to try to put into the follow-up to it as far as the Simpsons pinball party went. We just had a lot, you know, the stacks from the nuclear reactors on the pops. You know, things just bring back a little bit of what was then and what is now. Just a blast to do. I had the game, I would say it was 90 plus percent, 95 percent done when I decided to move on, went out and started a company that was still in coin op and kind of walked away from pinball for a little while. They changed a few things on there, but the ultimate design is identical from when I left. a couple of elements in the game changed. I think there was a few cost prohibitive things that I had put in there that they kind of pulled out and went to some standards just to bring it in on their cost. But one of my favorite games I ever got to put together, and one of the games that you know a good game when you shoot the whitewood and it's fun. That's a big tell from the design side is when you have no art, You know, no sounds, no light shows. You're just shooting the ball around on a whitewood. And I just felt it, and so did a lot of guys in engineering, that this was going to be a good one. We had it down in the whitewood. It felt good, you know, the first time we put it together, and it just got better from there. Keith did an outstanding job. Boy, it's top one or two on his list of awesome games that he's done. But that thing is so deep and so much fun. It's a fun game. It's a really fun game to do that we did. The reverse flippers, my goodness. I know that's Keith's baby or whatever, but when that was pitched, first of all, were you there at the time when he pitched that? Yeah, I think that was in there then. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it was just wacky. You just go, what are you talking about? How is this supposed to work? But then you cross your arms, and all of a sudden it's natural. Your brain is still working, but you've got to cross your arms. And it was a very strange thing to happen, but that's when guys have a real passion for pinball. They'll come up with all kinds of things and make it a little different. It's so deep. I play it all the time. I've never come close to completing it. I can't even do Alien Invasion. Can't lock those five balls, but darn it all, I still try. And that's what makes me keep coming back to a great game like that. So, yeah, we had a 10-year void of no Joe Balser games. And then all of a sudden, Jersey Jack sets up, and they contact you to do this. You're back again with Keith Johnson on Wizard of Oz, which was revolutionary. I mean, look what that game has done to pinball today. The first LED display. Still the best-selling JJP game. and again, great toys, which is kind of a Joe Balser staple. Tell us about making Wizard of Oz. Jack had been in touch with me, and I was one of the first hires to come over and start Jersey Jack Pinball with him. He had Wizard of Oz on his radar, and that's what he wanted to do. You could see the possibilities with a theme that way, and you bring the movie home, and you watch it a few times and you get freaked out by the flying monkeys and, you know, it brings back memories when you were a kid freaking out about the flying monkeys. But you can see all the great possibilities to make that happen. When we went to dinner one night, Jack and myself and a couple others that had been with the company at the time early on, and he said that he had a surprise for me that night. And we're sitting there eating dinner just before dinner, and I was talking with someone else or whatever, and I turn around, and there's Keith Johnson. And what he did was he put together what he thought as the best team he could put together at the time to do Wizard of Oz. He knew the success of Simpsons. He was there when we were shooting Whitewoods at the time, and, you know, he just wanted to put it back together. So there was some, you know, big old man hugs, and here we are again, and we're going to do something great, or we're going to hopefully do something great again. And it all started from there. Wizard of Oz was never going to be a small game. Jack wanted bigger and better on pretty much everything we did.
    54:36
    You know, I spent time trying to talk him down. We really want to have a game with an upper play field as our first game. No, we want a game with two upper play fields. We really want a game. We want to move ahead and we want to go to LED display.
    54:56
    What's the biggest one we could fit? Okay, what about RGB LED lighting? Yeah, and let's put that in there. And how about RGB LED GIs? And we just, there were no range. You know what I mean? It was, can it be bigger? Make it bigger. Can it be better? Make it better. And it was unusual because as a startup, you're wanting to throw everything in in the kitchen sink, but then you got to build it. And all the ripples across, you know, the water trying to get that game to the line, you know, having issues going along the way. Again, it's a startup. You're trying to build one of the bigger games that have been built. It took longer than expected. The game has done extremely well for him. He comes out with different versions of it, and it's a beautiful game. I think, you know, as a startup, we probably could have came out with an LCD LED display, and we could have been done with it for the first one. But, you know, wanted bigger and better. So that's how that game became that big. And because of that, that's why it's still being built today. it's different it's themed a little different but they're still taking orders and wizard of eyes is still moving for jjp five years later they're still making that game and it is still being sought after by so many different people you said they threw everything in there and i didn't know if you originally wanted it to be a wide body or just the regular size i wasn't sure I was all for wide body. I really was. Is that the case with all of your games? If you had a choice, it would be wide body? If I had a choice, I really believe that because, yes, I would. And the reason being, you have a little more real estate. You're going to get a couple of more lanes out of the game. You know what I mean? It gives you more room to work with. As a designer laying out, you have X amount of square inches to work with on a standard, and you go from 20 1⁄4 to 23. So it doesn't sound like much, right? You're picking up 20 1⁄4 to 23, so 2 3⁄4 inches, an inch and three-eighths on a side, really. But that's another lane. You can make a few more things happen, and I like it. An API wouldn't go that way. There's always a possibility of us doing a wide-body layout. I will never say we won't. But that, I thought, would become the standard. And that's what we talked about at JJP, as we would make the wide-body to 23-inch wide play field our standard. And we did that moving forward with a Hobbit layout. And you could tell the difference between the two games. But when you get the trolls popping up and down in the bigger area of the play field, it looks like there's nothing there. But once they're playing, I mean, that game loads up pretty quick, and there's a lot to shoot for. So as a designer, as a mechanical guy, I like more real estate. But, you know, there's a lot of naysayers out there on wide bodies too. So who knows? It's personal preference, I guess. It's funny when a wide body comes out and people say, wow, it doesn't play like a wide body. I guess what they're saying is it's not floaty. When I play a game like Guaz, to me, it doesn't seem like a wide body. Some do. There's a difference, I feel, when I play Hobbit. And one of the questions about Hobbit that always kind of comes up is that upper right flipper, you know. What is the upper flipper meant to shoot? And since you're the guy who made it, I'll ask you that. Well, that was all the time was meant as a kill shot to get Smough, okay, to get the dragon. I actually had four flippers on that game. We pulled one and turned it into a slingshot on the left side. There's an upper left slingshot. Just to the left of the dwarf. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just before I left JJP, we changed that and got rid of the upper left flipper. The one thing that I thought, and I don't think it ever really made it to program, was if you used, like the flippers were different swords, okay, because the game is all about the different swords. So if the upper right flipper was, I forget the name of the kind of the top dog sword that's out there in The Hobbit, if you made that shot, if you made the kill shot from the upper right flipper, it would be worth big money compared to if you just made that shot when you weren't qualified. But I don't think that aspect really ever came to fruition on the game as far as the programming of it went. So it's really that it was there for the kill shot on Smaug. It had more meaning in my head than how it came out on the game as a final product, I guess, is probably the best way to put it. So you're the guy who designs the games, and you've got examples of someone like Keith Johnson who makes deep, deep, deep rule sets. Do you ever pull anybody back and say, that's too deep, it's not deep enough, we need more, we need less? What is that like for a designer like yourself? My main objective as a layout guy, as the layout designer of the game, is to do the best I can to make the ball move and make the shots work to the best of my ability to fit with the game rules themselves. So obviously the rules are pulled from the layout, and then the layout needs to come through to make the rules work. Over time, and this is just my opinion, but over time, rules have gotten so deep. Just like you said, you play Simpsons. It's one of your favorite games ever. You've never gotten to the end. You know, you've never gotten to that end game where you say, I got it and I beat it. Because we grew up, you know, competitively, you've got to beat something to feel as though you won, right? There's kind of a correlation between beating a game and finally feeling as though you conquered that game. And that goes into board games, to video games, to pinball games. They all kind of come from that same feel as an endgame. Pinball has, you know, kind of evolved where that endgame is really difficult to find and get to. I think the deeper players, the guys that are really into that side of the game are amazed at how deep these games go. So, you know, myself personally, I set games on easy, you know, at my house because I have people come over. I want them to have some fun and not necessarily have to think about what they're really doing unless they, you know, they're going to flip away. They're not real avid pinball players. A couple of my friends are. I might set the game up a little different for them. But we just want to have a lot of fun. And having a lot of fun makes the easier side of the game rules to me as opposed to the tournament or the, you know, the real hands-on, let's play some pinball feel to a game. So I never put, say, don't go there, you know, with any programmers I've worked with. I always try to add some stuff that I'd like to see in it. Sometimes it gets in, sometimes it doesn't. when it comes down to a crew doing a game you know i feel much more comfortable not not necessarily as a delegator but you have your job to do do it and the artist has his job to do do it and the sound guy and the guy that's doing display work my mechanical guys the ees everybody has a job to do And if you let people do their job, the final product will come out beyond your expectations. So you can always adjust rules down, but you can't add to them once the game's out there. You know what I mean? You've got to stop sometime. So, you know, as far as the programmers go, go get crazy. They do things that I never thought of, and it's fun. That's what pinball, I think, is developed into these days. That's what people look for. So I'm hearing that you are not someone who micromanages, which is probably very relieving to the people you work with. And again, I think earlier in the interview you talked about the more people in the early process that come up with different ideas, the better, and you can see what sticks and what works as far as costs are concerned. I know that's a big, big factor. But I guess with all these games that you've come up with, It had to come from somewhere. So what were the pinball games you loved when you were first playing pinball before you even started designing? Because these older games certainly weren't very deep, but yet very satisfying in making some of these shots. What were some of those games? Right. See, I have a different, like I have a background where, okay, I grew up in Cicero, Illinois. So I wasn't a big pinball guy. I wasn't a big video guy. We were out and about all the time out with my buddies. We were just hanging out in the neighborhoods. I played a lot of sports. I wasn't really into gaming of any type, really, as a kid. Except for I used to stop in what was known as the Aneta Hotel. It's a hotel on Laramie or Central. I think it's Laramie in Cicero. And it was a little city hotel that Al Capone and his boys used to hang out there when Al Capone was running around Cicero. I mean, I knew where his bungalow was and where he lived and all that stuff. You grow up in Cicero, that comes along with the territory. And in that, they had a restaurant bar in there, and they had a game called Ballyho. And it was a flipperless game, but it was, you basically played tic-tac-toe with it. So it was a five-ball game, and if you could get five, like a five-bagger, you would call it, across a 25 square, I think it was a 25 square dots or light pattern that you could turn with, you know, you can turn it with a button and try to line these up. And it was 10 cents a game. And it's been many, many years, so very okay to talk about. But, you know, I'd go there as a teenager and have a couple dollars in my pocket. I'd, you know, put a dollar into the game, which was 10 games. and you would win games. And then you could walk up to the bar and say, hey, I got 100 games up there. And they'd say, okay. They hit a little button under the bar and the thing would click down.
    66:28
    And they'd give you the money that you won. So pinball started out with me as this little place to make a few bucks because they would pay us over the bar counter on games that we won on the Valley Hole game. Which was not a game of skill. and maybe caused some of the, you know, we had to change that with the flippers obviously coming in. Yeah, because you could bump the ball around. You know, you just tried to get numbers. The ball fell in a hole. So after that, I was kind of, I didn't have a favorite pinball. I wasn't going out to really play pinballs. My life was in a different direction. I was working as a model maker, as a tool maker, model maker at General Motors. when I turned 19, found a job there, went into being a setup man there. And I was laid off and called back several times. And one of my customers, I was working as an auto mechanic part-time. One of my customers had said he had a, his nephew was looking for guys that work in a tool room. Said, I want you to go see him. Probably get you a job. So he sends me out to this Midway Manufacturing in Franklin Park, and it's this big white building and it has a Pac out front waka going across on this lit sign it home of Pac And I hadn even heard of Pac I knew what it was but I really never played it much either Walked in and there was if you remember those black signs with the white letters that they would push into the signs to spell words and names. I walked into this big, huge vestibule, and it said, Midway Manufacturing welcomes Joe Balser. and I nearly fell down when I saw it and I walked up to the lady behind the desk there and I said, I'm Joe Balser. She goes, oh, Mr. Balser, have a seat. And out comes this guy, Kenny Addison. And Kenny says, come on, I'll show you my tool room. And as we're walking there, there are literally video monitors stacked to the ceiling. Everywhere you could see, they were running Pac-Man games. and out on the floor was 8-Ball Deluxe. And they were sort of making pinballs and Pac-Man on the same building. Brought me into the tool room that you could eat off the floor, the cleanest tool room I probably had ever worked in. And he hired me. Next thing, I'm working there for a year or so, and they're looking for a guy to work with engineering for the pinball line. and there was a game, it was a video pin game called Granny and the Gators. I know it. It's done by a designer from back then, Claude Fernandez. So I met Claude and I did the fixtures, the line fixtures and the punch fixture to do the play field for Granny and the Gators. So that was kind of my first in on pinball and I was doing fixtures for production for Granny and the Gators, which didn't run very many. And then X's and O's was the next one. And from there, I just got a bug about pinball. I'd go in the lab, I'd shoot pinball every day. Worked on games like Spy Hunter, what was it, Black Pyramid, Kings of Steel.
    70:00
    8-Ball Deluxe was on the line when I started, and I think when I left they had like an eight-ball champ on the line. But then there was massive layoffs, and I was laid off from Valley. And, you know, luckily got a job at Waco after that, working on a game called Aftor. But my time at Valley, so 82, so I was 23 years old. That's when I got the bug for pinball because I was working with it and got to play it a lot, you know. and then working with guys, the design groups and guys from Valley Midway, getting to know a lot of the old-timers that were there. It just became a part of me. I was shooting it every day. I didn't have to go out and put my money in pinball. I was working for a pinball company. So that's how it came about. That's where the bug came from, and that's kind of where it's been the rest of my career, really. Today you are everything with American Pinball. It started with Houdini, and that's a game that you had to take over another layout to from John Papaduke. And really, it was changed quite a bit. I know you and I were talking about it at Expo. That was a quick turnaround. You've done quick turnarounds before, but this was a very, very quick turnaround, and you did it. I don't know how you did, but you did it. Yeah, it had to be done that way. When I first got there, I had an opportunity to get back with a startup. It had been a few years that I was out of JJP. I was working as an assembly. I was at an assembly plant as a plant manager, doing light assembly, heavy assembly stuff, nothing in the coin-op business, some stuff for WMS, for like toppers, for gaming, but not very much. I always had the bug to get back. I had an opportunity to go to this new company called American Pinball. Come to find out that, you know, they had a big black cloud over their head early on. There was a lot of issues working with John Papaduke trying to get, you know, his game out to customers. Once I found out a lot of that history of that, there was only one way to kind of start over for API. that was to come out with a game quickly, something that people enjoyed. They had already gotten the Houdini license. There was a layout for Houdini that, honestly, shots didn't go anywhere. It was more kind of put together and looked like for more of a show-me kind of thing for artwork than it was for an actual mechanical working game. ownership insisted on bringing it to a show uh the wheels kind of were falling off of that because people were looking at the playfield knowing that it wasn't really a completed playfield what are you guys trying to do and so i went back talked with owners and said look i think the only way we can do this thing is we got to scrap everything here you know if you've got any money tied into that ramp i can try to save the ramp just for the tooling charge but i'm gonna do a whole new layout? Without really a definitive answer, it was just time to do it. So in November of 2016, I was hired in October. So a month later, I took a piece of paper and scribbled out some ideas for the layout, started to put together a team, didn't have too many guys that we could hire. Everybody's working at Stern, working at JJP. They're out of the business. They've been doing something else for 15, 20 years. They're all set. They're all good. They're executives. They're out there. But we're able to put together a team of some quality guys. I told them at one of the initial meetings that, hey, we got this piece of paper here in November. let's try to get to Texas and they said okay Texas in a year right and I said no Texas in March yeah you're out of your mind there's something wrong with you you know a lot of expletives might have went along with that about in a little crazy but you know what within a couple of weeks Everybody bought into it. Vendors were helping us out in a big way. Guys were delivering parts on a two-day, three-day turnaround. They're dropping parts off at the shop 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock at night. We were working almost all-nighters. Just the passion from the original team was outstanding. and all the way up to the last waking hour before Texas, we were trying to bring three games, but we brought two. And they were two with a complete art package. They played. They weren't 100% or anywhere near 100% code, but they played. And we put all the naysayers to sleep because they all said they're just going to come with a box of lights if they do that. all the negativity about the company, yada, yada, yada. When we showed up at Texas and had a couple of working games, I'll tell you, you know, the tide changed. And in one show, you know, API was on the map as a player. We're in this. And we told them at the show that we would be shipping games by the end of that year, by the end of 2017. And we had a factory with no line. We had no employees.
    75:58
    You know, that was a pretty aggressive thing to say to begin with because we didn't have a place to build. I mean, we had a building to build it in, but we didn't have a line. We didn't have a lot of things set up. We didn't have a front office, basically. We didn't have procurement, you know, purchasing. We didn't have, nothing was there. we had seen over the last few years before that you know companies taking two to three to four or five years to get that game to market and we told the customer base we'd have them we'd be shipping games by the end of 2017 we said whatever we said you know we would do and we boxed three games on December 30th, 2017. So we didn't stretch the truth. We just said what we were going to do and we did it. A lot of work, a lot of hard work, a lot of hours, a lot of stress on yourself personally, your family members, everybody's involved. But we pulled it off. It took a few more months after that, a couple more months, to really get the line up and running and building quality games. I personally and Jim Thornton, who's my partner with this thing, kind of wears a bunch of hats, more of a project manager with me. He just does a lot of things with me to make things happen. And we rode that line and signed off on every game that went out the door for the first couple of months of production. It was hard to get quality people to come in. I mean, you can imagine, there's a lot going on. So we signed off on a lot of the initial games, which turned out to be a plus for us because those games went out and they worked. You know, that's pretty much the story of how that happened. We had to do what we had to do in that time frame or I think the API thing may have just blew away in the wind. We had to make a splash. We had to do it in a short amount of time, and that's what we pulled off. I was hoping the game was going to do a lot better than it did. That's our first one. There's been a few issues with it that we've tried to address as quickly as possible. We try to take care of our customer base and not BS them.
    78:25
    and just be a friendlier company to our distributors and to our customer base. We started out with that mantra, that's who we wanted to be.
    78:37
    We're on that path, and we're hoping that we become as good as we can be. That's just who American Pinball should be. The game is out. It looks beautiful. Houdini had a pretty good following there at Expo. There were several games there in the American Pinball section. In fact, American even gave one away. Andy Rosa was the lucky winner of a new Houdini pinball machine as people tried to win one. You said there are some issues you're trying to address. Coding is something you can do updates on. Is that something we will see with Houdini if that is, in fact, one of the issues? Oh, yeah. Josh is constantly, not constantly, but Josh is trying to get down to one or the last, you know, one or two big updates for the game and then put it on the shelf. So he's been working on a lot of things, a lot of input from people that he gives. He works with some guys out there in the field that do a lot of play testing for him besides what we do in-house. And he's trying to address a lot of things and take care of people's suggestions or issues that are out there. And obviously, you know, in code that becomes deep, you're going to find bugs in places you never thought were bugs. So, you know, it's coming down to the wire, though. I think, you know, over the next couple, maybe two, don't quote me, maybe two or three updates, and that'd probably be about it for Houdini because we're on to Oktoberfest full steam. When a game first comes out and you said you had this out at Texas under a very, very quick turnaround, but it flipped, there wasn't any code or anything on it, but it flipped, and you've come out with Oktoberfest and there's a lot more code on that and still a lot more to come. When the first feedback comes out and you know it's not a complete game and maybe some of the feedback is, oh, there's not enough rules or something stupid that makes no sense because you've already announced that there's more to come. When you get some of that negative feedback right off the bat, and I see this with every single company. We're seeing it now with the Beatles for Stern. No one's played it, but people are putting out their opinions. Does that drive you nuts? Because I'll tell you what, I tell every single person on this show in person, don't judge it until you've played it and the code is complete. Then if you don't like it, that's fine. But that preliminary criticism must drive you nuts. Oh, it does. And over time, you kind of wear your skin gets a lot thicker. You know what I mean? The one thing that I've learned over the years and more so these days as I get older is you can't please everybody. You can't. There will be people that will say this is a great shot and there will be the same amount of people that say that shot is too tight or it should be in a different place or whatever. I guess the bottom line is you just can't please everyone. You can't. And you kind of hope that what your vision was or your team's vision is that people get it and they buy into it and they have some fun with it. And that's pretty much the bottom line on trying to put a good game out, in my opinion. And I'm sure a lot of guys on our team would feel about the same way. There really is a difference between people just venting and bitching for the sake of that and not really having any kind of first-hand experience of playing the game, but just, oh, I think it looks like this, or I don't like this because I don't like maybe the band, as we see people complain about certain pinball machines that come out of certain artists. Those kind of criticisms are useless, but constructive criticism is a little different, and you talked about it at the start of this interview. There were 1,000-plus plays of Oktoberfest at Expo, and you noticed a couple things you wanted to change. And I think that kind of criticism, you as a designer, welcome big time. Oh, absolutely. That's so true. I mean, you can only get so much in-house that, you know, you have to get some feedback from others when you go on test or you go to a show. You've got to watch people's reactions to shots. You've got to ask them what they think about stuff. You know what I mean? How do you feel about that? What do you think about that shot? you know and and the more we opened up at shows the more people come to us now which is good hey can i talk to you about something joe yeah absolutely they'll send emails i got an idea or let me throw something at you now the guys that you know the people that are negative the people that want to just throw stones the people that can find wrong in everything send us your resume Yeah. Right? You want to be a programmer? You want to be an artist? You think you can lay out a game? You know, send us your resume. Let's talk. A lot of people will say a lot of things, but if you come back and say, okay, let's show me what you got, you know, bring it kind of thing. It somehow kind of turns a different way, doesn't it? You know what I mean? And that's how I kind of handle it these days. He's like, you know, Houdini had this thing about, you know, tight shots, a couple of tight shots. You know, tight shots are not bad shots. A tight shot on a game for a very meaningful shot, when you make it, it feels good. You know what I mean? I don't put shots out there that are, I don't know, a 30-second wider than the pinball. I mean, a minimum shot on a game that I ever lay out has got to be about, you know, it's going to be an inch and a half. A pinball is an inch and a 16. So, you know, going about 50% larger than the pinball would be the narrowest shot that I would let go and see if it's shot. You know what I mean?
    84:34
    So, you know, if you think it's tight shots, but then the next guy you see playing hits it three or four times in a row, you know what? It's not that tight. You're just having a bad day.
    84:45
    You know? I heard that when Houdini first came out. I don't know if it was the white wood or not. You wanted to make that shot tighter to what it is today. It was something different, and then it became tighter. No, no, no. It got bigger. The shot got wider. Oh, okay. The opposite. Early on, it had half-inch targets, okay? The narrow targets were half-inch targets. And I changed them all through a suggestion from one of my good friends who's a shooter. Why don't you bring those targets down to 3-8s? the blade behind them is 3-8. Why do you have to have half inch? And he was right. So we took all the half inch targets and made them 3-8 wide. So we picked up a 16th on a side or an eighth of an inch on the shots, on every shot that had anything to do with a narrow target on each side. So, and believe me, an eighth of an inch on a shot on a pinball machine, that's a lot. You know what I mean? So the shots grew. They didn't get tighter. Not at all.
    85:47
    All right, we put that rumor to rest there. So could you imagine a tighter Houdini? No. Then I could say, yeah, you guys are right.
    85:56
    Go to smaller balls. Use those hyper balls we talked about earlier. There you go. We can do that. Please don't.
    86:04
    All right. So Houdini, Oktoberfest 2, unlicensed themes, if you will. Yep. Easier to work in this atmosphere with a blank canvas and not having the restrictions of the license holders. What do you think?
    86:21
    Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But it's harder as an artist because you have a blank canvas, so you have to create everything. You don't have properties to draw from. I think, you know, if you want to get games out, I believe, well, I can't even say faster because we can turn, we've taught ourselves how to turn games. But, you know, a licensed thing comes along with a lot of assets. You're going to have video assets. You're going to have sound. You're going to have art for the play field. You're going to have a playbook. You're going to have a storyboard to work with right when you sign on the dotted line. So implementing all of that, I think, is I hate using the word easy with pinball, but it's not as time consuming because you have all these assets to choose from. It's just how you choose them and where you put them and how you turn it into a game, right? So the non-licensed thing, like you said, it's a blank canvas. You have to have really good input at first. You have to have a list of things you want to see on the game and then kind of hunt and peck through that, throw out what you can throw out, and keep what are the best of that list, and then move forward. So now you guys are doing your art as a vision because we've all discussed it. Myself laying out the layout for the play field, I'm off on my tangent there because I have a vision that we've all discussed, players on the team. And the guys that are coding have their ideas and their vision. and you just go off and get done what you need to get done and come back and see what you have. A lot of tweaking goes on then. Maybe we're in the wrong place here on this part of the game. Maybe this needs a little different, you know, but you control it. And that's what I like about the non-licensed thing is that it's in your hands to control. You make it or break it. You don't have to go and develop a back glass and spend all that hours and hours and then the time to produce it to bring it or to show it to a licensor and they say, no, we don't like that. or you know what I mean so the bottom line is with yourself and if you make good decisions throughout the process of getting to that first built game it's a really proud really good feeling when it all does come together and it's all it's all design in-house it's all put together in-house and there's nobody watching over you but your own crew or your own team that's what I like the most about it. Will API never do a license theme? Never say never. You know what I mean?
    89:17
    I don't see us never making a license theme. I think someday that will happen. But right now we're going to stick we're on the road we're on and we're going to go with the non-license themes. Things that are kind of pseudo licenses, I like to call them, where they're very well known. You know, you do your own thing with it. that's who we are at this point. That could change. It could change just like, you know, you change your socks in the morning.
    89:44
    I don't want to take anything away from Oktoberfest, but how far are you into the API game number three? Game number three,
    89:53
    we got two different directions we want to go. We just got to make a decision on turn it right or turn it left. You know what I mean? We got to keep it right. And there's a, you know, we have a list of kind of pecking order and how we're going to start hitting our next games. But we've got nothing etched in stone right now. We keep it all on a sandboard and the wind blows and it changes. We have to get stuck on it. As soon as this thing hits our line, we've got to get on number three and make it happen. But you have to love the theme to get behind it. I can't imagine. I know you didn't really know the Simpsons TV show, but you got up to speed. Keith helped you out. You've got to be behind the themes.