thanks for tuning in to the loser kid pinball podcast it's reveal day everyone's excited i'm excited this is like a dream come true scott is with me my co-captain is always right yep i'm here i'm so excited there's a few other people here too yes i'm messing up intros if you want pokemon because i know you want this game who are you reaching out to scott so i'll reach out to zach and Nicole Minney at Flip N Out Pinball. I am super excited for this game, and I actually have told people I have a rental property that I rented in Airbnb, and I'm planning on putting this in the property. So this will be featured prominently in my rental. Yes, bring all those new people into pinball, right? Fantastic. Speaking of bringing people into pinball, we're going to start with the design team. We've got quite the eclectic group of people here. Let's start with the lead designer, Jack. Will you introduce yourself and kind of, I guess, pass this around the table. Yeah, absolutely. My name is Jack Danger. I'm new to pinball, but I'm excited to be here. It was a really awesome project to work on. I got to kick this off, and I'm co-designing it with the illustrious George Gomez. Hello, everybody. I'm George Gomez, and I help Jack with the game. And with us, we have Tanya Kleiss, who is the lead developer, and a couple of his close cohorts on this project, Andrew Andrew Wilkening and Joshua Henderson. Hi, everybody. Let's go ahead. Hey, guys. Awesome. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I really appreciate it. I know right now it's down to the wire. It's game time. We're recording right before reveal, and so I know that there's a lot on your plate. First off, thank you for taking time out of your day to join us on the show. So but first, OK, Jack, I've known you for a while now since you've been streaming and everything like that. You've talked about Pokemon as long as I can remember. So tell us how this came about and how it was working on this license for you. This came about by complaining and asking over and over and over and over and over and over again. Yeah, this this this is sort of a no brainer license. Obviously, that's why I talked about it so much back in the day. but um yeah as far as like um getting this license if you talk to jody our lead licensing guy he'll say like he had to work on this for quite some time to get our hands on this um and when he did you know it was just like this it's it's wild that this didn't already exist as a pinball machine because they do have a history with pinball um but there's also like so many there's like a million different ways you can think of approaching a Pokemon pinball machine. Right. Um, so, you know, starting a, a game design doc with just, uh, ideas with the rest of the team, you know, sitting with Tanya and, uh, Joshua Henderson and just trying to like flush out, like, what are all the things like shoot for the shoot for the moon? Like what, what can we do here? Um, and trying to, you know, think of like what kind of integrations we can take from our inspirations. we could take from like other avenues of the Pokemon world and understanding, like talking to Pokemon, they didn't say no to anything up front. They just said like, we don't want to stifle any of your creativity. Just throw everything at us. And like, what do you got? And yeah, Tanya, if you want to talk a little bit about like how that process went, the daydreaming process? Well, we dreamed a lot of dreams. Yeah. So we we we knew that this game was was going to be something we hoped very much that is going to introduce a lot of new people to pinball. And so we definitely wanted to keep it very easy to learn, difficult to master kind of style. I know. and took a lot of inspiration. But so some of the key elements were, you know, like what are the key things you need for a Pokemon machine? One is a Pokeball. You need Pikachu at the very least. And you need what we like to have in Pinball, at least is some sort of adversary, some sort of big bad guy that you're going to be battling. And the character Meowth, who's the only talking Pokemon, is the character that came to mind. And so that's who we have. It's Team Rocket led by, you hear the voice of Meowth. You also will hear the leader of Team Rocket is Giovanni. And he's the real leader behind the whole thing, the dastardly. He's not so dastardly, but yeah. He's the one that's trying to take your Pokemon and use them for business purposes. So those are sort of the key things. And then we also talked a lot about, like, there's so many different Pokemon, how to pick, like, which ones we're going to focus on. And we definitely focused on the first generation as far as your team. and so we went through that and decided to pick Pikachu, Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur since they're all the starter, all the Pokemon, first partner Pokemon from the first generation that everybody I think knows There's 180 of them in the game and there's more coming. Yeah, the initial paper and pencil idea was you know the pokemon that i think everyone will remember is the original 151 right so um if you're new to pokemon or if you're like you grew up with it everyone remembers like that first gen chunk of pokemon so uh we lean heavily into that sort of kanto region collection of pokemon um but we with our game we're told we had to be region agnostic so even though we're leaning heavily on those original 151 with a smattering of like all generations our area is our own area in this pokemon game um which allows us a lot more freedoms to integrate hecking everybody uh from the pokemon universe pokemon catalog there by the way referencing something jack mentioned earlier um the actual name of the game is pokemon by stern pinball It is not Pokemon Pinball for obvious reasons because that title existed as a product a long time ago. And so the game is, you'll see it referred to as Pokemon by Stern Pinball. It's not, you know, it's like I think on all the official stuff, it says Pokemon by Stern Pinball. It will never say Pokemon Pinball or the Pokemon Pinball machine, et cetera. um true because there was there was two or three games back on the game boy and game boy vance yeah absolutely yeah yeah that's right yeah which which is amazing like i love that because that was one of the biggest questions well i guess two of the biggest questions when you come to a pokemon game right there was originally video games it came as a video game then as an animated series and so i know that like um your teams have spoke before like it's really hard to do 8-bit because it's just very exhausting when it comes to software when it comes to animation and stuff like that and so i think it was smart going with the actual animated series because you get those clips you get the voice actors and stuff like that as well but also be able to include all the pokemon i agree that the one first 151 is the most iconic but it is cool that they were like hey you need to include everything that we've got they were um they're very interested in in the game being evergreen so um they didn't want us they specifically didn't want us stuck in some uh sort of ancient history of Pokemon. So they wanted us to be able to kind of like, they're going, you know, they're always moving, right? They're always doing stuff. And so they kind of wanted us to feel that way. Yeah, totally. Like this not being Ash's journey means that it allows us to, for the foreseeable future, keep adding Pokemon as Pokemon are developed and come out. And like, again, just affords us a lot of freedoms to do some cool stuff that otherwise we would be handcuffed to region specific storylines and ideas and such. So, yeah, there's there's a lot of cool. But what's also awesome is on top of like. The all all the rules and stuff they have in place, like they're very meticulous about their IP and they should be. They're like the biggest IP ever. One of the cool freedoms they did afford us is when you look at a Pokedex, the object that keeps track of all your Pokemon, every region, as we come to find out, had their own specific Pokedex. And we weren't, since we're region agnostic, we couldn't use any of those specific Pokedexes. So they let us create our very own Pokedex for this game, which is wild. So when you look at the game and the Pokédex comes up on screen, you'll see this very unique to Stern Pinball Pokédex. It's got like flippers for buttons and stuff. It's pretty cool. And that's mirrored on the play field as well. The captive ball that's right at the center is the Pokédex. So you smash that to use your Pokédex to scan Pokémon. Can you guys talk about how the team approach to this game came about and tell people more about the process? Yeah, I mean, I think so, Jack. Jack and Tanya started down the path as in a very conventional fashion to how teams work at Stern. I think at that time, I forget. I know Andrew was on Star Wars. I don't know, Josh, were you were you with us when they started or did you join? He was very early on transitioning on to the project. Yeah. So my previous game that I worked on was King Kong with the Terra Island. Right. Right. So our time frame, I think, or March or April. Yeah. So so Jack and Tanya started down the path in very in very conventional fashion. I think as the company determined the need for Jack in this other role, it's a role that only Jack can fulfill, right? We don't have anyone else that has that combination of talents and skill that can do some of the community-facing stuff that we want him doing. So there were a couple of things that were happening. they were struggling a little bit with with they were like I don't know was it Whitewood 2 or something and it might have been Whitewood yeah yeah I don't remember but but and and I think I think the right side you guys were going there was a lot of back and forth on the right side of the game and and and time was time was was ticking and so we became you know concerned that hey you You know, time's ticking. Jack's got a pretty full plate and the marketing guys are throwing stuff at him, you know, with a fire hose. And and and so what do we do here? And, you know, I think I think a lot of what I did is refine the architecture. So I took, you know, I mean, you'll recognize a bunch of my signature stuff, but the reality is that it's Jack's layout. I basically, you know, I might have flipped some stuff and switched some things. I took a pretty heavy hand in some of the ramp designs on the right side of the game when you see it. But the toy concepts came from Jack and Tanya and the layout came from Jack and Tanya. It's interesting. People are saying that Jack had an amazing layout and that I, I basically uh you know chopped it down to my style or whatever I don't I don't know I saw something someone tried overlaying like some of your old designs on top of this and they're like see this is a one-to-one yeah they kept saying transformers this is just transformers read and so um so it's interesting is is that um you know and I'm Jack I'll tell you the layout is It was a fan-style layout with – the battle arena was always in the center. I mean the stuff I did to it did not change the conceptual direction of the game at all. And I also think it's – I mean, it does – it has a bunch of signature stuff, which Jack chose to do. I had nothing to – I didn't tell him, you know, put the sneaky – you know, put the side duck sneak in on the left side, which is going to fire the ball across the play field like the Bond scoop. I didn't say anything like that. I just like – I didn't, you know – What's cool is I forget who posted it, but there was a Reddit post where someone took a screenshot of the leak and they were dissecting every area of it to show like where I might have pulled inspiration from for this like layout. And while it is a fan, they were dead on. And it's like a lot of the things that I was inspired by with like, you know, Game Show and Junkyard and Judge Dredd and Elvira's House of Horror. Like all of that stuff is sort of like, you know, callbacks to a lot of that cool stuff. And it just happened to create a layout that looked like something George would have done. It was awesome. You know, when you see the right side ramps, the combination of the back, that outside back shot. I mean, I did that on NBA Fast Break, right? The outer orbit going up the ramp and coming around. And that, you know, I like the steel ramps. And so I created that entire array on the right side. Originally, Jack had the, he had the captive balls to the right of the ramp. And going underneath the ramp. And the one thing I didn't like is that so much of it was hidden. so I sort of I've I swapped them um the other the other uh issue was that right orbit was super tight and and so I I did some you know I did some gymnastics to get that to work better um and I'm actually super happy with the way the thing shoots I'm actually turned out fantastic You know, I was like tweaking is like tweaking. Yeah, that's 70 percent of making. We you know, we had a we had an issue with that center shot. The center shot was like, you know, was was not working. Yeah, we got that working. And then I think you had a single lane into the pops. I had a second lane and I spent a lot of time with one of the engineers, Mason Dooley. we turned that whole area into Swiss cheese trying to get the pop pumpers to work and we got it the other big architectural change that I made was I killed your rollover buttons yeah so the rollover buttons that are on Walking Dead we were I don't know how to say this we were allowed to move forward with like experimenting with those because we wanted them on Pokemon but they're like oh we could also use these on Walking Dead And so Walking Dead got in front of us and they got to use it. And then when we tried to put it on our game, all of them were like in sort of like a power stroke. And it was messing up all the shots. Jack your initial intent was that people were just going to randomly roll over them or something Exactly yeah Right You guys had Tanya you guys had talked about there was some rule tied to that right Kind of similar to World Cup soccer Exactly Yeah Like diglets popping up. Who knows what? We had a couple of ideas. I'm sure imagining older school, like Xenon has those little rollers over the top. All the little buttons? Or like Roller of Array that are in Tic-Tac-Toe type games. But with the Power Rangers, it's like a whole different thing from Mechanical. It's like zap and bow ping, you know? Yeah, they were killing every shot. So I was just like, okay. I mean, they were lofting the ball. They were creating wild reactions. And I tried everything. And then one day I went to see Jack and I said, guess what? I'm killing these rollers. It's funny because like looking, like I love to pull inspiration from older games. But sometimes when you try to take that stuff and you bring it to a more modern powered game, some of that stuff just doesn't work because our flippers now compared to what like Bally and Williams were using, like we have like rocket ships, man. These things are like cruising the ball. So the tiniest little bumps that they're hitting instead of just casually rolling over it, now they're just like shooting to the moon. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. To the advantage of this game, that all turns into really awesome combo systems. The game's got really cool flow, and then the area right in the middle, the arena area where the Meowth Bloom comes down, the geometry is really cool. It bounces around in there. On the Premium LE, we have a magnet, so you get even more random bouncing. But you get some really cool ricochets. You shoot up there, and one side of the target goes right across and hits the other side and comes down. It usually is a pretty nice feed. I left the pop bumper exposed up there too, so there's even more weirdness. Even if on the Pro you don't have the magnet to generate more chaos, that pop bumper is still exposed in there, so you're still getting all sorts of wild interactions. The other thing is the Meowth Balloon, while Jack may have been looking at Junkyard, the reality is that the functionality of it came from the Batman crane. so there's a spring in there inside of Meowth and when you hit the underside of the balloon you know he can react in all these different ways the mechanical engineers uh Tom Malcolm did an amazing job of absolutely that thing senses motion in every direction with a single sensor and um really super clever it's a and and it was all done with the arrangement of the geometry and there's the spring in there actually what's interesting about it is that when you when you hit it it has that batman crane thing where it'll fire the ball back at you so there's you know you it it absorbs some energy and it puts some back um and so it it feels great um and plus you know these guys have got me out chattering chattering away so um yeah that's a lot of fun so um And Tanya, you've made a bunch of, like, all your codes are great. I don't look at a single one of the games that you've touched, and it's like, ugh, I don't like playing that game. Like, every game I walk up to, it's amazing. I've got to ask, have you used any rules from those previous games or been inspired by them for Pokemon? Yeah, I mean, I take inspiration from, I mean, probably both Deadpool and Foo Fighters. I generally start with Monster Bash rules, and everything goes from there. So I'm more of a, I like simple stuff. So personally, like the structure, especially for this game to be accessible, like that golden era of Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, and Attack from Mars is definitely what we all agreed was the way to go. So each of the four shots for your team members has, you know, you shoot it twice, it lights a mode, you shoot it again, and it starts it. And then, and same thing is very simple kind of stuff. That's very accessible for someone who had no idea what they're doing. But then on top of that, we, we, we've added some combo systems and some of that took inspiration both from like the, from Deadpool, the weapons and Deadpool leading up to a big mech suit multiball. We're not going to be mechs in this game, but we, but the combo system, the pokeball combo will, you collect pokeballs and eventually in later code will, will lead to some cool stuff. and on top of that I have Josh talk about we have another combo system as well the EV evolution combos yeah there's like 8 secret combos I mean I like secret combos in games like I did all the banana combos in Kong so it's just a fun little side quest if you will to go for so there's 8 of them and some cool stuff that we have planned once you get through all of them which is really cool that's like really theme integrated to me like those that are not aware of an evie it's it's similar to imagine like a corgi puppy i think that's the closest you could say but it can involve like eight different ways so that's really cool like thinking of combos because you can definitely combine evie into multiple different things so love yeah the thing that i learned from kong is like when i'm so in general when i'm working on rules of the game i just like to flip the game and that's where i usually just kind of organically come up with rules and many of the combos I found on Kong I just found from just playing the game like left orbit to the river shot that's cool and I felt like the game should acknowledge you for doing something cool like that so that's kind of how the uh the different combinations for the EV evolution combos came to be just from playing the game I mean as you you can see here like I rely on often you know other other people for for like the deeper rule sets and things like that I mean both on Deadpool and, you know, we had Timmy and Mike Vindicore both contributed quite a lot to the rules. And then on Foo Fighters, I mean, it was both Jack and me, but also Raymond Davidson was quite involved in the rules on that. So I'm sort of like the – I set sort of the vision of, like, what the overall structure is going to be, but, like, then Josh came on and started really fleshing it out into deeper pinball stuff. And then Andrew came on even later and started fleshing out. we have a separate component that's even more Pokemon-ish kind of gameplay. So, you know, one thing, super high level, we, like Jack mentioned in the beginning, one of the things that's really important is it's obvious that this game is going to touch a lot of people that maybe don't know pinball or are maybe new to pinball, or it's going to attract people that are playing for the first time. So I think we all felt it had to be super approachable. and and so the you know the architecture was about making it super approachable and the you know the rules can can give you know the the the more advanced players uh the interest uh beyond you know beyond the the stuff on the play field so um the other thing that was like really key was the notion of being true to the franchise and so for example a hundred percent of the Pokemon drawings on the game are by the Pokemon company. So we didn't illustrate, we didn't interpret, and their attention to detail is beyond anything I've ever encountered with any licensor. So the line weights, the scale of one Pokemon relative to another, when you overlap them, the body positions in the composition, not to mention color palettes, not to mention this color next to that color. I mean, the amount of detail that went into this, they were looking at our stuff with a magnifying glass. You know, Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) led the art charge And him and his daughter did the bulk of the art and Haley. And they, you know, they did an amazing job at compositing material that they could not alter in such a way that it still fits and works into the layout of a pinball machine. right so um and that was i mean that was an effort that i it's really hard to uh explain to you how complicated that is but the reality is that you know when you see it it's a pokemon pinball machine and it's it all makes sense it all looks like it belongs um and but he it was it was torturous work i say i gotta say it does look like you literally pulled it from the pokemon universe which it makes sense if there was that much restriction or uh oversight when it came to the house so you guys hit it spot on i gotta say i personally am and it feels the artwork for pokemon feels kind of childish but hey this is a child's game right like yeah but it very much this looks just like if you set it up next to any other pokemon product i think you guys nailed it right on the head for their franchise absolutely i want to kick it back to jack for a second um one of the things that convinced me solid of this too you'd said on stream like pokemon is the top grossing franchise and you threw out this is like a four or five year old number 92 billion at the time like oh no it's 288 billion oh my goodness so i mean this is insane there's no um there's no franchise even close to it i think i think potter was 50 billion i think yeah um i think seth has a slide in the presentation that the dealers and maybe the influencers got that where he added like star wars marvel and a bunch of others and the combined edition of all the other big franchises doesn't it's still smaller so i gotta applaud you guys for getting this franchise because this This is an amazing stepping stone for people at Iron Pinball to bring them in. Was there anything specific, Jack, that you wanted? You're just like, it's Pokemon. I've always thought of this ever since I thought Pokemon. I wanted it to spit cards out, but boy, that's not a thing. You never know. That may still happen, Jack. Just from a pure logistics standpoint of security, people that fill up those Pokemon vending machines have security guards with them, and we don't need pinball operators needing a security detail to refill their pinball machines. Yeah, instead of the coin deposit on the coin door, the dollar bill, you just shoot out a coin. Yeah, exactly. Well, that was one of the rumors, though. Like you have like a hundred or one thousand because there's one thousand twenty five Pokemon. Your Ellie's all be one thousand twenty five and then have a specific card and that addition to that. I was like, that's a lot of it's a lot of work, though. But that numbers even even the numbers, the conversation came up because we published the numbers of each Pokemon. And so everybody was assuming that the Ellie's were a specific Pokemon. And yeah, and the Pokemon company warned us not to do that because. That would be a nightmare. You know, it really creates chaos for the ones that people want, right? And so I think they've had some extreme cases that they just don't want us to do that. There's also the case for, like, you know, we spoke about ideas on, like, how to do LE packages or even blind bags. So when you opened up your LE, you don't know which one you got sort of thing, like very Pokemon card opening. But at the end of the day, if you're spending $13,000 on something, you better frickin' know what you're getting. You don't want to open this up and be like, frick. The conversation did come up, right? And at one time, we also considered playing up the colors more. And we considered, you know, different color LEs. We had all those conversations, guys. We landed where we landed for a whole host of reasons after really, really kind of thinking through it. This is such a huge license. How does it come apart getting all of these people together lined up to do a pinball machine? It was super hard. It was a lot of work. I think it was a lot of work. I think these guys will tell you that we had a lot of – it was a roller coaster ride for the development team. I think that, you know, in things we, you know, maybe things we thought we were going to be able to do, things that, you know, the franchise is very designed and like their strategy is very cohesive, laid out, you know. And so, you know, we fit in a place, and I think the challenge is to execute on this game within the place that you fit. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah, I mean, I'd like to add on to that. I mean, part of a lot of the complexity, I mean, we did, the development team spent a tremendous amount of time working with the Pokemon company on this. And they spent, I mean, they put a lot of time and effort. They have a very large organization of people who handle the licensing of every aspect of Pokemon. And so we sort of pushed that. Well, not sort of. We pushed them. The group we started with was toys and merchandise and physical stuff. But they'd never made a pinball machine before. And a pinball machine is a lot more complicated than anything that this particular, the first group that we worked with. then we ended up, they ended up learning a lot, like reaching out to their AV department, to their sound people, and like all the way through the organization, sort of pushing like how, this is the first time they've done like sound music licensing, but I mean, other people in the building have, and so they sort of did a lot of cross department talking. Nothing they've ever worked on is as complex as the pinball machine. We may have also helped Pokemon, in a way, expand what they're capable of doing in some of these avenues because they had to branch out so much to ask permissions for things. And when it came to permissions, it was like we had to ask our team at Pokemon, they had to ask their team, and then that team had to go to Japan. And it was this, like, did we make it all the way up? Okay, is it coming back down with a yes? If it was a no, we got to figure this out. so um there was there was a form to fill out for if you want pikachu speaking in the game it can't come from the tv show and it can't come from a spend like you have to have the original voice actor from japan doing the voiceover so there's a form that we filled out and like you know we wrote about 80 different lines and they all i mean it all comes out saying saying the words the syllables pika pikachu you know that kind of stuff but each one of them has a different emotional content And it was a form that we submitted. And then that went to their group. They approved everything. They said, hey, come back and give us some time. You know, like, should this be three seconds or two seconds? And then that resubmitted. Then they scheduled the recording session. And then about a month later, we got back this incredible sound package from them. So think about think about the the breadth of stuff in the pinball machine. So the sculpts had to be approved by the same people that approved toys. Right. And and things like printed materials, two dimensional printed materials were approved by people that approve those kinds of things. And then, of course, you've got the video components and the audio components. They had never, ever had to marry all this stuff. Right. You know a toy goes in a box with some printed material but it doesn contain video video and you know it may contain audio but it doesn contain video Right Or live updates for that Right Right Or speech calls from the elf you know Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah So one thing Tanya, I think one thing you should talk about is you and Andrew should talk about like just things like the battles and, you know, just how we had, you know, some of the things, the environments and how we had to handle some of that stuff. just the notion of discover, train that whole thing sure, sure I'll start and I'll hand it off to Andrew but the you'll see there's the discover catch, train, battle mechanic which is a whole other mechanic going on that happens in main play you explore the play field basically you hit switches and you make progress and a Pokemon will spawn every Pokemon, like 182 different Pokemon can spawn in our game. And more coming. And more coming, yeah. And there's four different areas in our game. You'll see a map on the play field of Forest, Lake, Mountain, and Desert. And each one has their own characteristics of who spawns there. And I mean, I have all the books here. I've got this one, I've got this one, but what it really takes is a real Pokemon master to really give advice. and that's when Andrew came on, both like an awesome pinball player, but also like a Pokemon card game and video game and just a Pokemon, you know, dude. So he helped a lot. I'll turn it over to you. Yeah, well, I joined Stern just this past June, and I got straight into the Star Wars project. But as soon as I heard that we were tackling Pokemon, I was like, I need to be on this project. I mean, speaking of dream themes, this is it for me, right? So it was really exciting to try and merge the intuitive sense that comes to a pinball player with the intuitive sense that comes to a Pokemon, you know, enjoyer, player, consumer, etc. So trying to merge these two worlds into things that make sense for both worlds was really the challenge. So with catching, for example, you're just navigating the playfield as you would like walking through the tall grass or just in Pokemon Go, just kind of exploring new areas. and eventually you get an encounter chance and you decide, well, let me take this on, let me not. So by that, we hit the captive ball stack. Once you're there, then you're chasing after this Pokemon and trying to, you know, chase it until you can catch up to it and you can use berries on the play field to kind of, you know, from a pinball sense, enhance your hurry up, start over your hurry up. But in a Pokemon sense to, you know, try and slow it down so you can catch up to it, right? And eventually it ends at that Pokeball mech. on the premium the le of course you go into the subway on the pro you go up through the ramp and we have an up post that'll hold it so you can enjoy you know this light show and then again on the premium le the you know animations with the pokeball um that you know i think a pokemon fan will really appreciate and kind of you know enjoy seeing um and then of course besides catching there's battling and trying to merge kind of what a pokemon player would expect with what a pinball player expects, you know, and we can lean a little bit on what people are familiar with in Deadpool, which had its own fighting mechanism, right, or mechanic system. Merging those two worlds together with all the typing, which we've kind of simplified to, you know, spare the pinball world from having to learn the massive 18 by 18 grid of tight matchups, but communicating some of that information to pinball players with faster flashing and slower flashing for typing, advantaging, and extra points. But then something that I think a Pokemon player can walk up and kind of intuit, just, oh, green and purple when I'm playing Bulbasaur, that's grass and poison. And like, oh, the guy on the screen is a water type. I'm going to hit the green shots and do extra grass damage. That's just out of the box for a Pokemon player, but for a pinball player who's never touched the stuff, they just see a faster flashing and a slower flashing light, So hopefully that gets them through that and they can both, you know, move through this game in the same way, but with a different knowledge base and with a different experience walking up to it. And that's my goal. I think you did it. You did a remarkable job with the colors on the lighting. Totally. the insert lighting colors throughout the game and the integration with the expression lights on the LEs, both on the speaker panel and on the cabinet lights. And all of this stuff is like really seamlessly put together. And I mean, I play the colors, right? I know what I'm doing because I play the colors. And so I think more so than in anything I've seen recently, even from us, you know, I play the colors. Appreciate it, yeah. So, Andrew, do you get to pick a Pokemon that you use to battle, or is it kind of assigned to you? How does that work with the battles? So you start the game off, and you've got the four Gen 1 starter Pokemon out of the box. So you've got Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charmander, and Pikachu. So you've really got the tools at your disposal. to take on basically anybody as you kind of move from the forest, which has the bug and the grass types, to the lake, which has a lot of water types featured. So you have the tools of your disposal from the start button to really kind of make your way through the Pokemon world. Can you evolve them too? We're still working with Pokemon to figure out exactly how deep we're going to get into that space. But, you know, coming from the Pokemon world with, you know, I mean, I learned how to read playing Pokemon Yellow. So I wish I could just drag and drop all of that straight from the Pokemon games into it. But like we've discussed before, Pokemon's a really complex license with a lot of stakeholders on their end. So we're working with them. One cool thing is you're going to be able to collect them on IC. So there's going to be a collection. And so as you collect them in the game, they'll show up in the IC app when you're when you're logged in. Tanya, can you show your there it is? There it is. Pokemon collection. So and there's like I can hit that button just to see just the ones I've collected so far. Oh, and then, of course, when you when you when you click it, you know, he'll zoom into it and then you get and you'll hear you'll you'll read all about him. Right. Is that a separate app or is that included in your insider connected? That's insider. that's an insider sub-insider so with 180 Pokemon are you going to be able to be able to somehow narrow down which ones you want to go after or is it all random encounter? It's up to the biomes right now but like everything else the conversation is still developing a bit for us you know as we approach 1.0 down the road you know we'll be tidying up that vision but we've got a lot of different ideas you know like from the video games, they have the route system where each different, very specific region really narrows down that focus. We're exploring a lot of different options. Because it's not just the video games. There's Pokemon Go. There's the card games which come in series. There's TCG Pocket. And they all have their own way of targeting. And so we're still narrowing in on how do we let a Pokemon player really run through that collection as fast as they want to. besides just enjoying, of course, the random encounters that come up. I had a guy, you know, I was at Pinball at the Beach last weekend, and I had a guy come up to me and he goes, I am going to be able to have my Pokemon collection on IC, right? I was like, I think probably a good idea. Absolutely. So do you have to take your machine to different locations to catch different Pokemon? So like load up the game and drive around town because you need the specific Pokeball off of your game, remove it. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Very early on, we had a jail location concept associated to where your machine was. And we, we, you know, it's like we, I think, I think a Pokemon company discouraged us from it. Yeah. Jack, I've got to say, I, I think every game you've put out so far, it's been amazing. Thank you, brother. It's been great. X-Men's been great. This looks fantastic. I know there was a lot of heartbreak when you said you were stepping back. Are we going to be able to see Jack making more cornerstones as we move forward, maybe when life gets not so chaotic? I am in a new role now with marketing, but I'm not saying I'm done with designing, especially from a marketing standpoint. we're trying to develop a game but in that universe of developing that we're going to humanize every single person that is associated with every part of making something there I'll be bugging George to ask him for some trade secrets on how does he prototype a ramp because he's got this secret way of melting plastic together with super glue and baking soda or talking to the different electrical engineers how would you approach a game like that So I want like every single human that would put their hands on a game to be highlighted in like a project that we're doing. And then at the end, if a game shows up, it shows up and you get to jam on it. But I love designing. It's like even when I'm like off duty, I'm here in my studio still bending metal and doing stuff. So you never know what the future holds. I don't know. Well, I was going to say with this design, I think what you do great with all of your designs is you take really good essence of what people love about certain pinball machines and you're able to meld them together to make a very cohesive, fun playing game. Is that just kind of how you started this process as a designer or is it kind of something you learned as you went on? Yeah, I love looking back at things that I enjoyed from different games and trying to figure out how I can bring that forward. You know, like laying out a pinball machine, infinite possibilities. So why not choose the things that you loved the most from all those different things and try to like bring them into this new world that you're trying to develop? And it's worked out so far. So this is a huge license. Now, you're going to dip your toe into the water on other licenses that people have been clamoring for for a long time, including a lot of Nintendo licenses. And so is this possibly something that we can see in the future where you're dipping the toe into the water on these behemoth themes that haven't had a lot of pinball overlap, but there's certainly the desire there? you're talking about um like other video game ip or something or yeah and basically everybody's like super mario brothers you know zelda yeah all yeah all of these awesome yeah it's not a it's it's it's you know you're not off the mark i mean we we see the same things you see right so we'll see how we do but i think i think we're and i think there's a lot of i think on the staff there's a lot of people play games all kinds of games not just pinball games so um you know you you never know but i think it's it's there's obvious there's obvious entertainment stuff in those franchises that um could apply awesome anything's possible never say never you never know okay josh i want to know about your favorite part of this game coming up and what are the things that you're like this is awesome i'm glad we put this in the game i don't know i mean i think really just the highlight of the project for me was just being able to i knew the license was huge i wasn't familiar with it myself uh so i just focused on you know the basic pinball rules like modes and multi balls because i i felt like this game really should not have any kind of barrier to entry like it's everyone should be able to enjoy it regardless was their familiarity with pinball or not, or with pinball or not, Pokemon or not, excuse me. But, you know, I think it was, I think the highlight of the project was just, I think I really liked the Team Rocket multiball because, I mean, we knew right from the beginning, like, it was this, it's right up the middle. It's one of the first things you notice when you approach the game. And it was just, you know, it was important for that multiball to be very approachable for the casual player and the Meowth mech itself is fun. And it's fun to hit that around. So it was really cool. I think probably to get that in, get that playable. If I can piggyback, I, you know, I know Junkyard thought everybody's favorite game, but to see the Meowth balloon from the show merged with such an iconic mech as the Junkyard mech, I thought that was genius. Like when I saw that the first time, Jack, close your ears, don't get your don't let the head get too big i thought it was great i saw it and i was like this is gonna be great people are gonna love this that meowth balloon is is killer and it's it's right where it needs to be for a pinball player who doesn't know pinball or a pokemon player who doesn't know pinball to just walk up and whack at it right and you're gonna have a good time meowth's gonna pop up call you a twerp and then you're gonna have a good time so i i think it's interesting because i you know you guys you guys keep referencing junkyard but when i think of junkyard, I think of the ball hitting those targets. So I don't see it the same way. Yeah, Dwight doesn't either. Yeah, Dwight said to me, he goes, what are they talking about? I said, I don't know either, Dwight. I guess another close example of that layout, but without something dangling in there, is fire had the same sort of like triangular area inside of there. So the kinetics of that, you know, those angles, and it's funny because when I started messing with the play field, Jack was really scared I was going to break it. Well, I was too. So these guys are like, now, you got to understand, I've done this so many times, and to me this was not a big deal. So I moved the entire right side of the play field, and Jack's like, is that center section? That's still got to work. Dude, relax. It's going to work just fine. I love the movement of the balloon because it's not just back and forth. It's like you're hitting and it's just chaotic, right? Yeah. One thing I wanted to point out that Tanya had said is you said that you had to send in like 80 lines for Pikachu. So those aren't familiar with Pokemon. Pokemon only speak in their name, the syllables of their name. I thought they just said Pokemon. Like, help me out here because I don't play Pokemon. So Pikachu says Pika, Pikachu, you know, Snorlax, Snore, Snorlax, you know. So how the heck do you come up with 80 lines worth of dialogue when you only have the word Pikachu to work with? Well, there's a lot of emotion in the game. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was an interesting exercise. I guess I can tell you the secret, which is, I mean, first we identify, like, you're thinking about how is Pikachu going to react? Like, what events in the game? like you did something awesome or the ball drained or you tilted you know so and like what emotion does that what we ended up doing was writing small english sentences that you know you want to say like hi i'm pikachu i'm really happy to meet you and then just like here make that into pikachu speak and then the the the voice actress that's been doing this for years just knows how to do that like like express like how do you express this particular utterance by only saying these syllables, Pikachu, right? Or Pika Pikachu. Um, it, it, but it worked like we basically put little English sentences together. Um, and, and then said, and, and talked about the emotion that was being or what you're reacting to. And then you send it off into the, into the, the Pikachu cloud and it comes back and it it perfect Full Pikachu Yeah Even though we had like she has the best contract in the world for any talent because you not allowed to use prerecorded clips of her saying Pika for anything, anything that goes into a new product. She has to record fresh new right now. So she, for as long as Pokemon products will come out, she's got paychecks rolling. So, um, we did have the Pokemon company at all the recording sessions to make sure all the pronunciations were correct. And, and one of the funny things that happened is when Jack and I did the intro video, which you're going to see tomorrow, I don't know if you've seen it. Have you already, have you got, did you guys get a free? Yeah, we got a preview of it. Yeah. Right. So in that video, um, like, uh, when they, when it went in for marketing approvals, one of the comments was um both george and jack mispronounced so now now zach sharp was um you know like directing the shoot and he had us say he had us both say pokemon like 10 different ways and and um and it's a good thing he did because he knew that they might they might have something to say with the pronunciation so the final video that you'll see tomorrow that the world will see tomorrow has the correct uh dubbed in pokemon okay well what is the correct way of pronouncing it now i yeah i okay go go i so it's it's hard i mean it's like we say pokemon but the the somebody apparently we i don't know whether we did one of us say pokemon or i don't know what we know It's like you've been saying it a certain way for 30 years. Like how do you train your brain not to say that? Yeah, it's Pokemon. Pokemon. Wow, it's Pokemon. Yeah, I used to say it the wrong way. The way I used to say it was Pokemon. That's how I said it. Yeah, and I probably said Pokemon. The plural of Pokemon is not Pokemon. Yeah, we definitely don't make that mistake. But, of course, you have – there are the old CFO, Michael Donald. Like, we make fun of him because he says Poke-man. Yeah. Wait, is there a plural of Pokemon? Is it Poke-mons? It's Pokemon. Pokemon. Yeah. It actually translates from Japanese pocket monster. There you go. That's what Pokemon means. Yep. Interesting. So you have voice actors from Pikachu and from Giovanni, but you have spoken about Meowth and some of the other characters. So Giovanni is obviously custom language. It's like Jesse and James in it, but it's speech from the animated series. Where else are we? Yeah, we have Meowth and Giovanni. And Giovanni, Meowth was all, so sadly the voice actor did Meowth and the show passed away just in the last year. so all the voice that's in the game is from the TV show that we've harvested from episodes from seasons 10 through 25 but there's a ton, every episode he talks and he's funny but then for Giovanni we wrote custom speech for Giovanni who's the voice actor was Giovanni from the TV show and from the movies we also have the announcer the same voice actor is doing the announcer voice for the battle. When you go into a battle, you hear the announcer voice. And he's done announcer voices in the TV show and also some of the video games. We have the narrator. The narrator introduces everything for you. And he was the original voice actor from the TV show. He was on the show for about 12 to 14 years. Something like that, yeah. And then we have the Pokédex also as a voice. The Pokédex is whenever you're learning about Pokémon, on the Pokédex Speaks and also gives you instructions and prompts on what to do in pinball as well. So who's the voice of the Pokédex? Because it's obviously a stern Pokédex. Did you get to pick your own voice? Yeah, we did. Yes. It's one of our, I wish I could, Jerry Thompson, who's our sound guy, found her. It's not him. Yeah, it's not him. Yeah, but he found her and she's great. I apologize to her right now that I don't remember her name is. We actually went through, we had about four different Pokédex speaker auditions, and we picked a couple, and then we submitted to them, and we narrowed down on the perfect one for this game. Jack's not yelling, flippers and butts, babies, it's time to get to work. That would be interesting. It wasn't me. You should see the battles as like a big call-out. Okay, we did talk to Josh about this, but I actually want to get, you know, George, Daniel, Andrew, and Jack. So I walk up to the game. My first time I'm looking at it. And what's the one thing that you're going to tell me about the game? You're like, do this. It's really cool. Work the middle work, work that triangle up, uh, you know, work that the diamond at the top, um, that'll get me out down, um, bang me out, uh, you know, bang on my mouth and then make that center shot and you're into team rocket multiball almost right away um so uh lots of chaos the the beauty of that multiball is it actually really shows off the ramp system and i'm really proud of the ramp system i think that that all of that all those combinations you know um it really worked really well and so i think if you work the middle when you get that multiball, the jackpots are out throughout. So that'll force you to shoot around the play field. And I think it's a quick, fun, chaos moment with a lot of energy. I'll tell you, go catch a Pokemon and then go do a Pokemon battle. It's a little more advanced, but the more Pokemon you catch and the more battling, the more you'll score points. Actually, there's lots of ways to score points, but going up the middle and doing Meowth is awesome, but you can also explore each one of the different features, like the Squirtle Squad mode if you go up the Squirtle ramp or the Charmander Bulbasaur, but the more subtle thing that's happening in main play is you just go hit some pop-upers and switches, and eventually a Pokemon pops up. You hit the Pokedex to scan them, and then you chase them, and then you go and you catch them, and then once you've done just one, you can go into the town scoop on the right to start a battle. The other thing is listen. It's really great to be able to play the game where it's not a big, noisy environment because we're putting a lot of instructional speech in it. So hopefully you just go up and play the game, and you'll start learning all the different things you can do. Yeah, I'll go for more of a deep cut. On my game specifically, and I haven't done this on the other ones yet, when I shoot up into the middle area, I can actually bounce it all the way around the battle arena and hit the sneak in on purpose. Really? Well, if anyone else can dial that shot in, we can go off those, off the ten point, and then it will fly into the sneak in. I'm wondering if anyone else can pull that one off. That was intentional. That was designed like that. Okay. I didn't mean to steal your thunder then, Jack. Triple captain ball stack. That's what I did with that one. You know, just a small aside. So there's probably, there's been about, besides the games in the programmers' offices, there's probably been like three games floating around the studio. And the games are in this room we call the test room where the testers hang out. And every time I walk past that room, there is someone playing the games. And I mean, and I'm not kidding. And to the point where to work on the game, I've had to kick people off the game. Now, that more than anything, tells you that the game is something special. Because a lot of times you're actually having to like create like playlists and say, okay everybody you're playing at 10 you're playing at 11 i don't think you had to do that with this game and people just like gravitated on the game yeah i love seeing the the things move right so shooting up the middle getting all those cool ricochets when that magnet takes over in that battle arena and it starts generating that chaos every once in a while it'll surprise you by like throwing it up into the the shot straight up the middle um when the meowth balloon comes down and you're bashing that as george was saying like that spring action it sort of fights back a little bit and every once in a while also you'll like get a weird sneak in in the back it's just like a really fun area to battle in but i mean if i had to pick something else that we haven't talked about you know we got a bowl on this game and when you shoot the left ramp once it's lit and it diverts into the bowl above the left flipper um bowls are interesting because if your tilt isn't set tight you could sit there and probably keep that thing in there forever uh but we've gone to great lengths to make sure that that is not the case but it's fun to like shoot that on repeat and try to see how many revolutions you can get to just really start racking up points on those uh squirtle squad modes there yeah that squirrel bowl was um was a bit of a pain because uh the initial design kept the ball in there for six years and so we had like we're like and i've seen this over the years i've seen every time somebody's tried a ball it's it's it's feast or famine so some you can't get them to work right and other times they work too good and this this one happened to work too good so too well and um and mason dooley did uh a lot of work to get But Mason and Mason Dooley and Thomas Malcom were the two mechanic engineers on the game, and they did amazing, remarkable work. You know, I talked about the the mouth mech and, you know, Mason chased a lot of details on things like that, that the squirtle ball and, you know, that system on the left side. yep that's one that i actually had i didn't touch that rat that that left ramp that was all thomas and and jack and um and that works that works great too yep yep it's a fun ramp and like the the catching mechanism on that ramp as far as like the the pokeball will like rock back and forth when you're ready to catch and you shoot it and the ball just disappears objectively you just put the ball inside the Pokeball. You don't know. It just vanished. Then it plays this animation, kicks out of the side there. There's a lot of cool little fun things hidden all over this game that I think people are going to appreciate. I'm a home buyer. I'm looking at buying different games. Tell me about the different upgrades that I get by getting the premium and the LE and the things that would enhance the entire game experience for me. So, I mean, my feeling is if you can get an LE, there's 750 of them. And by the way, this is the 30th anniversary year of the franchise, and we are not doing a 30th anniversary game. This is the 30th. So this is the 30th anniversary game. and a small aside about that is that all the places Pokemon is doing all kinds of things in all kinds of places to celebrate the franchise on this year and you'll see the pinball machine in a lot of places because it's just going to fit in I think if you can afford one and you can get one, the Alley is a stunner i mean it's just a beautiful beautiful game um especially you know the mirror came out great the um the side armor um by the way the you know the the armor system now is modular so you can buy just the inside lights you can buy the inside and the outside lights you can buy just the armor with no lights um so it's it that's intended to make it affordable and um and also let you sort of customize your game however you want and that's going to be the same for the you know that's that fits the pros and the premiums but i would say if cost is no object you can actually get one because like i said there's only 750 of them get the le if you can't the the the magnet which is missing from the pro and the sneak in um and the lock on the left ramp um that underneath the pokeball, which makes the pinball disappears. I think it's worth it. That said, I think those pros, you know, they're going to kill on location. You get all the flow. You get, you know, you get Meowth. You get, you know, you get basically a lot of the game with the pro. So it's a super high-value pro. you look inside and it's got a pokeball it's got Meowth um and it's got Pikachu Pikachu doesn't you know his head doesn't track the action and stuff like that but on the pro but I mean those are the differences I'd say I'm I'm a big fan of premiums so I would say the same thing that what the premium has is magic like it's got hidden magic like the magnet it has the ball It disappears underneath the Pokeball, and it has the Pokeball animating. It has Pikachu animating. Especially the magnet is just a lot of fun. It's just another level of interaction. What you can't tell until you play it is that the combination of the magnet, the target array, Meowth, and the exposed pop bumper creates all kinds of really cool stuff up there. Definitely. Well, we've taken plenty of your time. Thank you so much for you guys coming on. I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to talk about this amazing franchise, this amazing pinball machine. And George, I know we're the day before, but I heard these are already all sold out for the LEs. So if you're listening to this, good luck. I don't know what else to tell you. I did. I heard the same thing. I heard the same thing and I kept telling Seth maybe that 1025 wasn't such a bad idea I don't think it was oh my goodness thank you again for coming on there's five of you if you want to get a hold of them I'm just going to say reach out to Stern I'm not going to have you all throw your deets on here everybody play Pokemon Pinball I'm sorry Pokemon by Stern Pinball Yeah, Pokemon by a Sturm Pinball. Good correction. If you want to get a hold of us, we are Loser Kid Pinball Podcast at gmail.com, at Loser Kid Pinball on all the socials. Seriously, this game is amazing. If you want to get one, call Flip N Out Pinball. And if you want some of our swag, silverballswag.com slash Loser Kid. Scott, give us our last words. You want to unmute your mic? Oh, my gosh. I'm the worst. Okay. All right. We'll try it again. Go ahead, John. Scott, give us our last words. You got to catch them all. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .