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Pinball Magazine & Pinball News PINcast October 2022 recap

Pinball News & Pinball Magazine Pincast·podcast_episode·2h 49m·analyzed·Nov 4, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.038

TL;DR

Pinball Expo 2022 recap: Stern reveals James Bond 007, discusses controversial $2K topper pricing.

Summary

Jonathan Houston (Pinball Magazine) and Martin Evans (Pinball News) recap October 2022's Pinball Expo, the 38th annual event held in Schaumburg, Illinois at the Renaissance Hotel. Key reveals included Stern's James Bond 007 (Pro/Premium tiers, no LE announced yet) and Jersey Jack Pinball factory tours. Major discussion covers venue logistics, manufacturer updates, code development status, and emerging concerns about Stern's pricing strategy for accessories like the $2,000 Mandalorian topper that unlocks exclusive gameplay modes.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Expo 2022 was the 38th edition, held at Renaissance Hotel in Schaumburg, Illinois

    high confidence · Hosts confirm this as factual event information

  • James Bond 007 was running code 0.54 at Expo with placeholder message: 'all movie clips were awaiting licensor approval'

    high confidence · Martin Evans states he saw this on display; Jonathan Houston confirms seeing it on previous builds

  • Stern is moving to two new locations five blocks away: one woodworking facility, one manufacturing facility with twice current capacity

    high confidence · Martin Evans reports direct conversation with Gary Stern confirming the move for next year

  • Ray Tanzer, recently inducted into Pinball Hall of Fame, will coordinate the new Stern facility move

    high confidence · Martin Evans provides specific reference to past move success (Melrose to Elk Grove Village)

  • The Mandalorian topper costs $2,000 and unlocks exclusive gameplay modes (topper multiball and connector topper awards)

    high confidence · Jonathan Houston cites this as major concern; both hosts confirm the pricing and exclusive mode access

  • Rumor: Jersey Jack was in talks for James Bond license but turned it down; Stern then picked it up

    low confidence · Martin Evans explicitly frames as unverified rumor; no corroboration provided

  • Hotel bar closed at 11 PM despite show events running until 2 AM Saturday night into Sunday

    high confidence · Both hosts experience and confirm this operational issue

  • Jersey Jack factory tour showed cleaner, tidier facilities compared to Stern factory

    high confidence · Both hosts directly observed and compared factory tours

  • Pulp Fiction pinball game (rumored Chicago Gaming, Royal Thrills, or Play Mechanics) has been complete for five years but not in production

Notable Quotes

  • “The show itself was absolutely wonderful. I think people were a little disappointed with the new location and the way the show was laid out in 2021, and I think those comments have been taken to heart and addressed by show organizers.”

    Martin Evans @ early in discussion — Confirms Expo organizers responded to 2021 venue feedback

  • “The Renaissance Hotel...quite an isolated location. There is nothing else other than the hotel within the grounds or nearby.”

    Martin Evans @ venue discussion — Key complaint about new venue accessibility

  • “I found it a bit clunky...if I had to compare it to Queen...I thought it had a lot more flow to it than James Bond did.”

    Jonathan Houston @ James Bond gameplay discussion — Early gameplay assessment of code 0.54

  • “All movie clips were awaiting licensor approval...which is a very clever way of indicating that it's not final code.”

    Jonathan Houston @ James Bond licensing discussion — Identifies placeholder text strategy and licensing delays

  • “They basically closed the factory down on Friday and by Monday morning everything had been moved and was getting ready to start production again...Tuesday they were already making sub-assemblies and on Wednesday Games were rolling.”

    Martin Evans @ Stern relocation discussion — Demonstrates Ray Tanzer's logistical expertise on past move

  • “By scanning and playing in any of those collecting machines at these launch parties you'll really get a special digital launch party badge on your profile.”

    Jonathan Houston @ Insider Connected features discussion — Illustrates Stern's new gamification approach with badges

  • “The hologram is actually a transparent 2D display, so it's not a 3D hologram, but it's 2D.”

    Martin Evans @ Mandalorian topper discussion — Clarifies technical reality vs. marketing perception of topper feature

  • “You may have to pay in order to access additional features for your game in the future. Is that the direction Stern is going in?”

Entities

Jonathan HoustonpersonMartin EvanspersonPinball ExpoeventStern PinballcompanyJames Bond 007gameJersey Jack PinballcompanyQueengameThe Mandalorian

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern Pinball expanding manufacturing capacity: moving to two new facilities five blocks away; one woodworking (dust/mess separation), one manufacturing with 2x current capacity; timeline next year

    high · Martin Evans: 'he basically told me they are moving to two new locations five blocks away. One will be a woodworking facility...The other building will be twice the capacity they have right now'

  • ?

    community_signal: Stern implementing Insider Connected features: launch party badges, location directories with leaderboards, tech alerts for operators; pro version requires subscription

    high · Jonathan Houston: 'you will be able to discover local launch parties...get a special digital launch party badge on your profile...Operators who use the professional version of Insider Connected...new tech feature for operations where the game will basically alert them if there's a malfunction'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Early James Bond 007 code 0.54 gameplay assessed as 'clunky' by Jonathan Houston; right ramp and drop target bank shots problematic; improved with play; flipper alignment varies between machines

    medium · Jonathan Houston: 'I found it a bit clunky...that big, that drop target bank and the rocket that's behind it, that kind of kills everything' and 'I found that the game...played very differently to the one I'd been playing in London previously'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: James Bond 007 licensing complications evident from persistent 'awaiting licensor approval' placeholder on all builds; three different movie versions may require separate license negotiations

    high · Jonathan Houston: 'The display on the James Bond Pinball machines explicitly said that all movie clips were awaiting licensor approval'; discussion of Doctor No, You Only Live Twice, Goldfinger, Thunderball as separate movie themes requiring distinct asset negotiations

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.507

0:00
It's Pinball Expo Month Queen Pinball revealed at last James Bond 007 also revealed at last Hi, my name is Jonathan Houston I'm the editor of Pinball Magazine and I'm joined by I'm Martin Evans, I'm the editor of Pinball News and Jonathan and I are here to look back at all the excitement that took place in the month of October 2022 in the wonderful world of pinball. And, as we often say, it was a very busy month, but it certainly was this month, wasn't it, Jonathan? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's Pinball Expo Month, for those that don't know. Pinball Expo is the longest-running annual pinball event held in Chicago, the heart of pinball, the center of the pinball world, so to speak, as most of the manufacturers are located in the Chicago area.
1:01
And, well, let's start off with Pinball Expo. This was the 38th edition. And the second year that the show was held at the Renaissance Hotel and Convention Center in Schaumburg, Illinois. for both of us it was the first time for sending the show at that new location we've been at previous shows in well the past couple of years it was in Wheeling Illinois and you've been also at the Ramada and other location where it was held but for both of us the Renaissance Hotel and Convention Center was a new location let me ask you what do you think of it How are your findings? Okay, well, firstly, I think the show itself was absolutely wonderful. I think we weren't there last year, but we did get a lot of feedback, and I think people were a little disappointed with the new location and the way the show was laid out in 2021, and I think those comments have been taken to heart and addressed by show organizers, of course, led by Rob Burke and family, and David Fix, too. Right. But for us, this is, as he said, our first time seeing the new location. The hotel was a nice enough hotel. One of the comments that's been always bandied around last year, and which still holds true this year, I think, is that it's quite an isolated location. There is nothing else other than the hotel within the grounds or nearby. by, whereas when we were at the West End in Wheeling, we were quite spoiled by the fact you could just walk out the front of the hotel and there'd be an array of various eateries, there'd be like a Subway, there'd be Dunkin' Donuts, there'd be bars, there'd be a nice winery place, all of which you could enjoy if you didn't want to eat in the hotel, and all of, well not all of which, but some of which stayed open until quite late at night. Right.

medium confidence · Martin Evans cites 'what I heard' without attribution; designer Mark Ritchie was absent/unwell at Expo

  • Stern did not permit visitors to factory during Expo week citing COVID concerns, but later allowed Spanish delegation of 20 people

    medium confidence · Hosts discuss the inconsistency; suggests possible alternative unstated reason (parts/secrecy)

    • Jonathan Houston @ Mandalorian topper discussion — Raises concern about paywall model for exclusive gameplay modes

  • “We don't do rumors, but the rumor that I heard is that the only reason that Stern decided to do a James Bond pinball machine was because Jersey Jack was in talks with the licensing company.”

    Martin Evans @ James Bond licensing discussion — Disclaims rumor status while reporting speculation about competitive licensing dynamics

  • “You can see when that happened and how long it was open for, that kind of thing. So all that's being rolled out as part of the pro version of Insider Connected, which of course is not free.”

    Martin Evans @ Insider Connected tech features discussion — Emphasizes subscription requirement for new operator features

    • game
    George Gomezperson
    Jack Dangerperson
    Steve Ritchieperson
    Gary Sternperson
    Ray Tanzerperson
    Rob Burkeperson
    David Fixperson
    American Pinballcompany
    Mark Ritchieperson
    Pulp Fictiongame
    Seth Davisperson
    Ametroncompany
    Insider Connectedproduct
    Godzillagame
    Mark Feigenperson
    Chicago Gamingcompany
    Keith Elwinperson
  • ?

    personnel_signal: Ray Tanzer (Stern logistics expert, recently Hall of Fame inductee) coordinating facility relocation; previous relocation Melrose to Elk Grove Village completed production within days

    high · Martin Evans: 'Ray orchestrated everything and had basically they were printing out new games within a week...closed the battery down on Friday and by Monday morning...by middle of the week they were making games'

  • $

    market_signal: Mandalorian topper priced at $2,000 USD with exclusive gameplay mode unlock; raises concern about Stern's paywall model for premium accessories

    high · Jonathan Houston: 'the price which is 2000 American dollars yes that was one of the things which caused concern'; 'you may have to pay in order to access additional features for your game in the future. Is that the direction Stern is going in?'

  • ?

    announcement: James Bond 007 officially revealed at Pinball Expo with Pro and Premium tiers; no LE or 60th Anniversary edition announced yet

    high · Multiple hosts confirm Pro and Premium models on display; Jonathan Houston: 'No LE or the super LE 60th anniversary one. Yeah. That still hasn't been officially revealed yet.'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pulp Fiction pinball game (rumored Chicago Gaming/Royal Thrills/Play Mechanics, designed by Mark Ritchie) reportedly complete for five years but not in production; expected Expo reveal did not occur

    medium · Martin Evans: 'apparently, what I heard is that the game is already done and ready to go for five years and it's still not in production for some reason' and 'People were expecting the game to make its debut at the show, but that wasn't the case'

  • ?

    product_strategy: James Bond 007 three-tier model (Pro/Premium/LE) with movie-specific versions (Doctor No, You Only Live Twice, Goldfinger/Thunderball variants); licensing renegotiation required per movie theme

    high · Martin Evans: 'we've got Doctor No and You Only Live Twice...Goldfinger...Thunderball...they've applied that to a much simpler game...they've gone for a they've applied that to a much simpler game where they don't need so many assets perhaps the one that Keith Elwin is designing'

  • ?

    rumor_hype: Unverified: Jersey Jack Pinball was in talks for James Bond license but declined; Stern subsequently acquired it

    low · Martin Evans: 'the rumor that I heard is that the only reason that Stern decided to do a James Bond pinball machine was because Jersey Jack was in talks with the licensing company to see whether they could do a James Bond type of thing. They turned it down'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Mandalorian topper uses transparent 2D display technology (not true 3D hologram) creating depth illusion; similar to head-up display

    high · Martin Evans: 'the hologram is actually a transparent 2D display, so it's not a 3D hologram, but it's 2D...it's more like a head-up display'

  • ?

    venue_signal: Renaissance Hotel venue improvement over 2021 complaints but isolated location (0.8 miles to nearest eatery); hotel bar closed 11 PM during active show (until 2 AM); concrete floor without carpet caused foot discomfort for extended attendees

    high · Martin Evans: 'quite an isolated location. There is nothing else other than the hotel...The nearest alternative eatery...was signposted outside so it was 0.8 miles away'; 'The bar was closed at 11 o'clock...show on Saturday night didn't finish until 2 o'clock in the morning'; Jonathan Houston: 'They didn't like that the entire show was on a concrete floor with no carpeting'

    • 3:08
    Remarkably, the hotel bar already closed at 11. It did, yes. Yeah, so while there was quite a party going on around the fire pit in the centre lobby, so to speak, which could be heard up until the seventh floor, I think, people had to bring their own drinks. Yes, that's something which I've read comments about before and hoped wouldn't be the case, but it certainly was.
    3:37
    And it's a real shame that even while the show was still going on, in some cases the show on Saturday night didn't finish until 2 o'clock in the morning on Sunday.
    3:44
    But, as you say, the bar was closed at 11 o'clock, and people were sitting around making their own entertainment and making it quite noisily as well, which I apologise for my part in that. But anybody who was disturbed... I remember when you could hear you singing. Well, it wasn't just me.
    4:04
    But it was a good time. But that aside, I think the hotel was a very good standard. The rooms were OK. the facilities were good. It was quite a long walk from the hotel rooms themselves over to the convention centre. So it wasn't that easy if you sort of bought something in the show itself or needed to get something from your room to go from one to the other. It was probably going to be like a ten minute journey in each direction.
    4:31
    But it was very clean. The facilities, apart from the bar, were good, I think. and I don't think we have any particular complaints about anything in that other than things you can't do anything about. There is nothing else in the area. The nearest alternative eatery I think was signposted outside so it was 0.8 miles away from the brave hunt but they do run a shuttle service or a bus which can take you to places in the vicinity if you've got the time to do that. It's made it a bit difficult for us. Especially $20 to tip the driver. Well that's true, probably be honest with you, to get an Uber. But, yeah, we did miss the, you know, when we finished doing our work at the show, around about 11 o'clock at night, to take all the equipment back to the hotel. Everything was closed. Yeah, everything was closed. Yeah, so I did walk up to, I think the nearest restaurant, if you want to call it that. Oh, rather. was a Wendy's, which, well, if you don't mind walking, it was within walking distance.
    5:48
    There was another, there was a bar that had a kitchen, but I walked in there and there was a stage with a stripper pole and I was like, okay, this is probably not the place where I want to eat. So... It wasn't for you to perform, was it? Yeah, well, I had a night off, so I... Okay, fair enough, you're on vacation. Yeah, so I went with the Wendy's, but I was by foot and only the drive-thru window was open, so I walked up there and tried to order stuff, so... And then I was lucky that they had some seats outside, because indoors was already closed, so... But, oh well, it's... you can't blame Expo for that I have to say in my humble opinion I think the hotel has a sort of what I would probably call Texas pinball vibe around it in the sense that if you're there's rooms going up and I think up to the seventh floor you can walk down or you can look down into the lobby and so on and after that it's covered, which is sort of similar to the hotel at Texas Pimple Festival, which also has a convention center basically inside next door, so to speak, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, it's kind of attached to those notes. But yeah, it does have that sort of atrium where all the rooms are on the four sides of it and you look down and see and hear people. Right. What I also like very much, and also very Texas-like, is that in the main hall, the show floor if you want to call it that, vendors, manufacturers and free games are all mixed up together. Yes, that's something which has changed from last year where I understand the free play games were in a separate room. Yes. Which I think people didn't like so much. No, so basically you have the free play games and the vendors combined, which is basically more traffic for vendors. And I found it very pleasant, so to speak. The only complaint that I heard from several people is that they didn't like that the entire show was on a concrete floor with no carpeting. Yes, wearing on the feet, I think, was the comment. which, well, I can't really comment on that because I wasn't in the hall for long enough to find out but I can understand if you were wandering around all day that could well be the case you'd need to wear some appropriate footwear. Yeah, well, Stern were smart and they red-carpeted their entire stand so, first of all, it was easy to recognise that you were in the Stern booth and second, it was easier on the feet.
    8:49
    Yeah, so a big encouragement to hang around their machines. But I agree, it was nice to be able to just browse the vendors' stands and then if you just fancied having a few games of pinball, just go and play some and then carry on and just pick up where you left off. It's a nice way of doing it. Also, it's a more intelligent use of the space that they have. They have a large area. It takes up two of the three halls of the Convention Centre. The third one on this occasion was being used for a home and garden show but it was the other side of a removable wall. Yeah, that was a very nice show as well, by the way. I can highly recommend it to anybody. If you're done with pinball, see that show as well. Yeah, it was free entry as well, wasn't it? Yeah, I picked up some really nice items for my garden. So, yeah, I was lucky to take them home with me. Good. Oh, well, I'll try and edit some at the same time next year. and make a concerted effort to go in, although there was a certain lack of time to do anything much, I found, personally. Yeah. Well, that's probably because you were so busy recording all the seminars for which I applaud you. Well, with your assistance, thank you very much. Yeah, well, I tried to get you to enjoy the show, but you just wouldn't leave.
    10:17
    Well, that's the problem. If you want to be able to write a report about the show, and the seminars, you kind of have to listen to them and find out what people were saying rather than wait until it's all over and then go back and watch the videos. But if you weren't able, and there's the blatant plug there, if you weren't able to visit the show or indeed watch all the seminars, then you can catch all 25.7 hours of seminars in our county, on the Pinball News website, which in the Fimball Expo 2022 report or on the YouTube channel. There are links between the two in various places. I'll be linking to both the report and the YouTube channel in the Fimball Magazine newsletter, which will go out a couple of days after this recording. Excellent. And I know people certainly appreciate reading that too. Yeah, and speaking of which, I also linked to them in my reports on the Pimble magazine website, which I'm still finishing up. The Pimble Expo report is there, but basically it's lacking a few paragraphs, I suppose, but most of it is there.
    11:36
    And I'm doing separate articles on the factory tours that we did. We'll come to that a little later. So those are separate articles which I will link to in my report as well, but you'll find everything on the pinball-magazine.com website. So if you go there, you'll be redirected to all of those. I am there right now. Okay, very good. Yeah, I can see your factory report. Yeah, I could be. So, well, we'll get to that, but we have a factory report at Jersey Jack Pinball, ahead of Pinball Expo and we followed that with the factory tour at American Pinball which I still have to put up and this time I went with sort of a photo gallery type of report with captions explaining what you see in the photos so that was the easiest way for me to get it out of my system and move on to other things I also had to do get it on the website, that's the important thing I'm just finishing up my one of my factory reports the American pinball one which I just needed to confirm with the company that none of the pictures I took showed anything which they didn't want to see so that's all confirmed and then yes I will go back and do the Jersey Jack pinball factory tour as well but I should also mention that thanks to you went on the factory tour which was part of Pinball Expo which was a very nice bonus for those who haven't been to Pinball Expo before it has up until now been common for the show to include a tour of the Stern Pinball Factory but this year it was swapped over to doing a Jersey Jack Pinball Factory tour yeah and we'll probably get to Stern Pimmel later on. Yes. But Stern Pimmel did a virtual factory tour during their seminar where Jack Danger walked everybody through the factory and if you've seen that video you probably understand why Stern didn't want to do a in-person factory tour because basically the factory, they have parts laying everywhere.
    14:07
    And it's not a savage stern, but basically that factory is so packed with stuff. If you compare the stern factory with the Jersey Jack Pinball Factory Tour, I think the biggest difference is, everybody will notice how clean and tidy the Jewish Jet Pinball Factory looks compared to the Stern one. Yeah, absolutely, and the American Pinball one as well. Yeah. Which I noticed, when I was asked what was there, it was in the old location in Springwood. And they were, that was before they were actually sort of taken fully under the wing of Ametron. I don't want to get too much onto the American Pinball stuff just yet, but Ametron is a printed circuit board contract manufacturer, and they have absolutely spotless facilities, because they showed us around them. And that seems to be a sort of principle which has now been applied to American Pinball, with whom they share the building, I have to say. So the American Pinball floor looked absolutely spotless. Yeah. So, I find from the many play fields that were... Yeah, yeah, I mean, there was no dust or dirt or rubbish or litter or anything on the floor, so... So, yeah, anyway, we'll come back to that a bit later, because we're still on the Pinball Expo part. Yeah. So, there were the seminars, which were interesting. No big announcements, I would say. There were a couple of announcements, but I wouldn't say they were really big news. No, certainly no shocks, no reveals of games that we thought might appear there. Oh, well, speaking of that, one of the games that was expected to show or pop up at the show was the long-time rumoured Pulp Fiction game.
    16:07
    From Chicago Game. Well, we're still not clear whether that is a Chicago gaming game or a Royal Thrills game or a Play Mechanics one. The design is rumoured to be by Mark Ritchie, who was also not at the show. And I did text him a couple of days before the show and basically he told me he wasn't feeling too well. so hopefully he will feel better soon. It's a pity that apparently, what I heard is that the game is already done and ready to go for five years and it's still not in production for some reason. So if we have more news on that in the future of course we will let you know. People were expecting the game to make its debut at the show, but that wasn't the case. Indeed. So, yes, one of the things which wasn't revealed there. But there was plenty still to see, and we will come on to some of those things as we look for... I guess we should probably move on to what each of the manufacturers have been doing in the past month, and include the Pinball Expo, their Pinball Expo presence or not, as part of that. So let's start with what Stern Pinball were doing, because, as you already said, they had a large carpeted stand at Pinball Expo with multiple models of their James Bond 007 machines. Yeah, pro and premium. Pro and premium. No LE or the super LE 60th anniversary one. Yeah. That still hasn't been officially revealed yet.
    18:03
    And, well, it was still running quite early code or software on those James Bond machines, wasn't it? I think it was. I played it actually on the Wednesday before the show opened. Yes, that's right. Which is probably the best time to play games anyway for us reporters, because during the show we hardly play anything more. Code 0.54 I saw at the screen. If you want my personal opinion on the game, I found it a bit clunky. And if I had to compare it to Queen, to which we will get later on, although a lot of people apparently are negative about the Queen game, I thought it had a lot more flow to it than James Bond did. Okay, I kind of disagree with that I think, I'd have to say. I think that the James Bond game does have a lot of flow, but that big, that drop target bank and the rocket that's behind it, that kind of kills everything that goes up to it. So that's the kind of, it takes the flow out of it in a way and you do need to shoot those drop targets. But I also think that shooting them can be a useful way of setting up the upper flipper shot as well. So it looks like you're bricking shots and sometimes even on the upper left orbit shot that can rattle and stop the ball if you don't get it shot cleanly. But again it just kills the ball and it just rolls down very slightly onto the upper flipper, which sets it up for the inner orbit or the side loop, or the side ramp shot. So I found it played quite well, but once you get into the flow of it, literally it seemed a little, I would agree, from the start it seemed a bit clunky, but once you get going and get the ball moving around, I thought it flowed very nicely. Yeah. It could also have to do with the alignment of the flippers. I think I've played three different James Bond games and I noticed that the angle of the flippers on each one was slightly different, so that doesn't help of course. That's true, yes. If you go from machine to machine you have to readjust and so it can start starting off again. The most funky area I would say was the two ramps on the right side in the middle of the playfield. I just found it impossible to make those shots. I was only shooting post. Well, let me say that I found that the game, I think, I only played one game, I played the premium on the stand, and it played very differently to the one I'd been playing in London previously. When I played it in London, the right ramp shot was a given, you know, it was almost impossible to miss it. But the one that was on the stern stand, I found a lot harder. And in fact, I hardly shot that right ramp at all. It was quite a difficult shot. So I don't know whether that's just differences in the way in which the game was set up or whether they made any adjustments to the way that ramp is built or the entrance to it. Maybe the posts on the entrance have moved. Yeah, so one of the things which I find rather key, I would say, as Pimble Expo the display on the James Bond Pimble machines explicitly said that all movie clips were awaiting licensor approval which is a very clever way of indicating that it's not final code and so on but it could also mean that any clips shown at Pimble Expo might be taken out because the licensor won't approve of them Yeah, that message has been on every machine I've seen so far of theirs. It was on the early code that was at the Christie's auction preview. It was also on the code which they use for the BFI film festival thing, when I recorded the longer video. So that's something which is consistent. And I guess it's a little disappointing that at this stage they still haven't got approval on which clips they can use and which ones they can't. You think that would be sorted out by now? Yeah. So, I mean, we know that Steve Ritchie started the design, that was trashed, and then when Steve left his turn, and then George Gomez took over. But you think that by then, licensure approval for, you'd know which clips you would like to use, I assume.
    22:56
    Yeah, I wonder whether it's changed, because obviously now we're looking more at individual movies for each of the different versions. So we've got Doctor No and You Only Live Twice. And what's the other one? Goldfinger, is it?
    23:13
    Thunderball. Thunderball, yes, you're right, yeah, for the LE. Maybe originally they were trying to get all the movies together as a complete package in the way they've done for the 60th anniversary one, but that didn't prove possible they couldn't get the assets they needed so they've gone for a they've applied that to a much simpler game where they don't need so many assets perhaps the one that Keith Elwin is designing and they themed each of the other machines around single movies which would then require a renegotiation of the license to get the assets they need for each of those so I'm sure doing three movies is probably going to be quite a difficult licensing juggling act, I think, to make sure you get everything you need. So it's understandable that it's more complicated, but I thought they would have sorted that out by now. The version that we were playing, 0.54, I think, certainly had more clips and sound clips, or more movie clips and sound clips than the version that I'd seen before. But I don't think the rules had moved on very much at all. There was hardly anything else in the game. It just seemed to still be the bird one and the jetpack multiball, and that seemed to be about it. And I think there was maybe a second Q's mode, Q department mode in it, but that's all. There was very little else in it, and everything else looked exactly the same. So it hadn't moved on a lot. Yeah. I did hear an interesting rumor, though, about the James Bond game. Oh, I did too. Yeah. Not that we knew what it was. No, well, we don't do rumors, but the rumor that I heard is that the only reason that Stern decided to do a James Bond pinball machine was because Jersey Jack was in talks with the licensing company to see whether they could do a James Bond type of thing. They turned it down and Stern then picked it up. So, I'm not sure whether this was the sort of Godzilla type of scenario that we've seen before, where Stern basically went after a license after another company already was discussing or negotiating it. But, yeah, I found it interesting that Jersey Jack turned it down, and I'm sure they had their reasons for it, if true. After all, it's just a rumor, so take it with a grain of salt. But I found it, well, interesting enough to mention it. Yeah, I mean, I would have thought James Bond would have been a good theme for any manufacturer to use if they can get the assets, which is something we know has been a problem in the past. Yes. Although, you know, they did do a GoldenEye Sega, anyway, a GoldenEye game. A GoFundMe one with Roger Moore on it. Or a Roger Moore look-a-like. Ah, yes. But that was back in the day and not their best game, I suppose. Yeah, and didn't require a huge amount of video assets to go into it. Yeah. Anyway, just before Expo, Jack Danger streamed the official gameplay of James Bond with an interview of with George Gomez as well.
    26:40
    We were trying to actually be present at that recording, but we were told that, first of all, we were not supposed to come to the CERN factory, and second, it was in a private setting, and it turned out that it was shot at Jack Danger's studio, which we could have attended probably if we would have known, but we didn't. And instead we had a lot of fun at Mark Feigen's house, but that's another story for later on. Yes, but they did say that no visitors would be permitted to come to the factory during Pinball Expo week because of fear of spreading Covid. Yeah, which is, on one hand I can understand, then again, at Jersey Jack nobody, okay, factory line workers did wear face masks, but other than that I don't think most of the people were concerned with any of that. and well get a comment from Stern from ok sorry we can't have you come over and then a Spanish delegation of 20 people shows up at the factory get the tour, take pictures, post them all over Facebook not exactly may not be entirely accurate what they were saying yeah so no I guess my guess is that they were probably as indicated earlier first of all the factory is packed with boxes with parts everywhere and chances are you might come across something that we're not supposed to see yet so I get it but then just say like we can't let you guys come over because or you have to sign an NDA or whatever that's fine but you know anyway Okay, well some interesting news that did come out of Pinball Expo and the seminar which
    28:42
    which certain people held there, where as you said, doing a factory tour, a virtual factory tour with Jack Danger moving around the factory with various degrees of success because the signal kept breaking up and either the video would become very blocky or it would freeze or drop out occasionally as well. You might kind of wonder why they didn't just pre-record the whole thing and just play it. Because there was hardly any interaction back and forth between Jack and... It would have improved the quality a lot I suppose. Yeah, because it was hosted by Gary Stern and Seth Davis who were in the seminar hall and they just were watching Jack's tour on the big screen. Yeah, and so the minions we were getting at this was probably the last factory tour that Jack Danger streams in the current facility, as Stern intends to be moving to a new location next year. Yes, we have talked about this before and suggested that they might have to move, and Gary Stern apparently confirmed that. Yes, I talked to Gary at some point privately, and he basically told me they are moving to two new locations five blocks away. One will be a woodworking facility, which, well they already have a woodworking facility and they are already printing their own playfields and then send them off to get them clear-coded and what have you, somewhere else. That will be in one of the buildings and the other building will be twice the capacity they have right now and that will host the main manufacturing. manufacturing, yes. Yeah, the lines, right. So they keep all the woodwork, dust and mess away from the production lines. Yes, yes, very clever to do that. And similar to the move to the current Elk Grove Village location, Ray Tanzer, who was inducted into the Pinball Expo Hall of Fame, also during Pinball Expo, will be coordinating this move again and if you recall from a couple of years ago when Stern moved to this Elk Grove Village location from Melrose I think Ray orchestrated everything and had basically they were printing out new games within a week so that yeah I think you think Gary was saying that basically they closed the battery down on Friday and by Monday morning everything had been moved and was getting ready to start production again and did so during that couple of days after the Monday so by the middle of the week they were making games. Tuesday they were already making sub-assemblies and on Wednesday Games were rolling, complete games were rolling So That's A project for Ray Tenzer to sink his teeth in I think And There's no exact date Announced yet when this move will be happening They're still looking at Various scenarios I think But Stern will be Moving Okay, well Stern obviously had a big presence not just on the floor of Pinball Expo, with all their numerous machines. And I didn't count them all, but they certainly had several dozen, I'd say, of mixed machines. James Bond, Godzilla were the key ones that they were showing there. But they also had a big block of seminars as well, as they normally do. And they had their own autograph session as well, right next door, where Stern designers and artists were there, and management, to sign various items that you wanted to bring to the wall, or just go and talk to the people concerned. But one of the sessions which they had in the seminar room was concerned with Insider Connected, of course, which they are pushing very heavily at the moment, understandably. Well, yes and no, but okay, we'll get to that maybe. Well, so they made a few announcements there about new features which they're adding to, or have added, to Insider Collected. And so starting with the James Bond game, if you log into your Insider Collected account, you will be able to discover local launch parties for James Bond. and by scanning and playing in any of those collecting machines at these launch parties you'll really get a special digital launch party badge on your profile, if that's not exciting enough. Yeah, not worth anything and you can't exchange them or anything but... No, but some people get very excited about things like Pokemon and you've got to try and catch them all. So if you can get that badge. It will also be able to point you at locations in your area where these launch parties will be. So you can pick and choose. Operators who use the professional version of Insider Connected will be able to go to the locations. And those locations will be showcased on both the player homepage and in the location directory. And you'll be able to have a high score leaderboard generated just for those launch parties as well, which is a new feature. Right. And I think there's also a new tech feature for operations where the game will basically alert them if there's a malfunction of any sort or if something needs to be adjusted or what have you. That's right, yeah, it gives you the tech alerts onto your account, onto your screen, and also gives you information about various events that happened with the game, such as anybody opening the coin door. You can see when that happened and how long it was open for, that kind of thing. So all that's being rolled out as part of the pro version of Insider Connected, which of course is not free. You have to subscribe to that and register your location and machines. in order to do that. So, other, well, sort of big, stern news that came out during, or just ahead of Pinball Expo was the reveal of the toppers for The Mandalorian. And it's a very nice looking topper which includes a holographic display. A so-called holographic display. Well, people, so when I first, I saw a video of it, and I figured it looked really cool, and then I saw it in real life up close, and it turns out that the hologram is actually a transparent 2D display, so it's not a 3D hologram, but it's 2D, and, okay, it gives the impression of, from a distance, that it is a hologram, but it's not. Yeah, it's more like a head-up display. Yeah, and it creates a little bit of depth because it's in the center of the topper and there's still a background behind it. So there is that 3D type of illusion, but it's still just a 2D image which is being displayed. that wasn't the only mind-blowing thing about that topper as there was also the price which is 2000 American dollars yes that was one of the things which caused concern I think about the release of this Mandalorian topper was the price the other thing was the fact that it opens up some new modes for gameplay which are only available with the topper Yes, so you get the topper and that unlocks a topper multi-ball and also inside the connector topper awards I think. Yeah, we've seen this before I think, where, was it Jurassic Park? Was that the one where you could spell out Jurassic on the topper and get another mode? Yes, yes. Yes, so I think that just sort of was feeding more into the idea that you may have to pay in order to access additional features for your game in the future. Is that the direction Stern is going in? And that's a question I put to Seth Davis during the seminar, which you might hear if you watch the video. And he certainly didn't rule that out and said, you know, if they can come up with additional features beyond what was originally intended that add value to the game, they think it's quite reasonable to charge for those. So then the question is, well, what is a fully finished game and what are additional features? Right. Well, I suppose the definition will change a couple of times in the future, depending on how much money is involved. Yes, I suppose the thing to do would be to get to a point and say, OK, this is the finished game. game, from now on anything else will just be bug fixes, anything else given for free will be bug fixes and any features we add above and beyond that will be downloadable as additional content which you may have to pay for. Then people can make their mind up about whether that game is worth their money or whether it's quite lacking and still have... it's kind of like what they did with the Pro Premium LE model. You know, you used to have the one model and now you get the base model and then if you want the extra features which would have been included, some of which would have been included in the standard edition before that, then you have to move up and pay a higher price and get the premium or the limited edition version. So they can try to do the same thing with software by Samson. Which is not a surprise really that's certainly a way to generate a revenue stream from the software rather than giving it all away. Right yeah so oh well so that's one area where Stern is developing. I can't help since we were speaking on the the Insider Connected seminar and this is something that I hope to be able to ask George Gomez in the future it's not that long ago that George was heavily explaining to well as reporters but everybody in the pinball world that the game is on the playfield and Stern was one of the last, if not the last manufacturer to move to an LCD display because it takes a lot more content to fill that display and that requires a lot more people. Yeah, and a lot more cost and a lot more licensing. Exactly. So he was rather reluctant I would say to move to an LCD because the game was being played on the play field and now we have George preaching inside a connected like there is a new religion out there and I'm still thinking the game is being played on the play field what changed his well opinion or point of view whatever you want to call it I'm very curious to to get an answer on that at some point in the future. But I found it quite remarkable. Well, I don't know if you remember back in the days of games like Transformers, another George game. And that game, the play field and the apron and the back glass, it was plastered with QR codes, left, right and center, scan here, go to this website, read all about it. really immersive information about that particular game.
    41:43
    And that all died out very, very quickly. And then, of course, QR codes had come back again as part of the Insider Connected system.
    41:51
    But the thing which worries me about this is that if you go and scan those QR codes on Transformers now, it'll go to, try and take you to Transformerspinball.com, I think is the website, which doesn't exist anymore. Right. So all those QR codes are totally redundant You know there a password all over your game but they don lead anywhere Yeah So that um is entirely connected If it doesn generate enough revenue is that going to be phased out as well and all these readers you've got on your machines will also no longer function? Yeah, so, what I did find interesting, speaking of Pinball Expo, there also was the Scorbit seminar, where they made a comparison between Scorbit and Stern Pinball, where they basically stated that Stern or Insider Connected is supporting 18 games at the moment, and they are like 400 something games. I'm just wondering how long it will take before any of the other manufacturers will basically accept Insider Connected accounts as well, and integrate them with Scorbit, or basically hack the whole Insider Connected. Well, it was interesting, but something I wasn't aware of, because I wasn't following the Scorbit story too much, was that the team from Scorbit said that up until, I think they said August of this year, their system worked perfectly well on Stern games with Insider Connected. But then Stern released a software update which basically killed Scorbit and doesn't allow it to run on their machines anymore. Right. So you have to bear in mind that Insider Connected is a huge data grab from both the operators and the players as to what you're doing and what they're doing. And that's the value to Stern, I think, from offering it as a free service. They get all this data about what people are doing, how they're playing the games, how the operators are operating them, where they are. And they get all that stuff that they could never have got before. It's almost like pulling games out on test and standing there with a clipboard noting how long people are playing for, what they're hitting, what they're not hitting. So they're getting all the audits and a whole bunch more. So I don't think any other manufacturer is going to want to be giving that information to Stern. You know, are JJP going to say, well, okay, we're going to link in our Toy Story game to Insider Connect so now Stern knows exactly how that game is playing, what people are doing on it? I wouldn't have thought that would happen. No. Scorbit seems to be the more open, well, it is the more open platform, open platform and inside the connectors is very much a closed box for use by Stern. Yeah, but apparently, data is, well it might sound a little bit harsh, but it's the new religion at Stern. Yeah, that's right, it's given them insight into how people play and operate games that they never had before. And also, we've seen this before when,
    45:21
    I can't remember exactly which game it was, that they had out on location in London. But it was a game which was on an arcade and wasn't meant to be turned on, wasn't meant to be playable by anybody, but the operator did turn it on, and it then connected to Entitled Connect, and the next minute, it's going to ring up the operator saying, this game shouldn't be turned on, why is it on? Because they know, they're keeping an eye on it. They're keeping an eye on it. Wasn't that Rush?
    45:50
    Yeah, probably was, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was there for EIG. Yeah. That's right. Oh, well. So, oh, well. Yeah. Other stern news. They did release a making-of video of the Jurassic Park Home Edition, which I will link to in the Pimble Magazine newsletter. they will go out in a couple of days.
    46:17
    Besides James Bond, which I assume was on the line, or at least for part of the month, they were also building the last run of Guardians of the Galaxy and Godzilla Premium.
    46:30
    I'm not saying it's the last run of Godzilla Premium, sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But the last run of Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah, for now, at least. Yeah, or they have to renew the license, but it announces the final run. But we've heard that before. Yeah.
    46:48
    Okay, so let's wrap up the Stone Pinball update for October with some new code information. Where is my pillow? Okay, you want to get your earplugs, really, for this. And, well, there are only three games, Godzilla, Rush, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Godzilla has probably the most interesting one of the three because when you start Godzilla Multiball, which is probably the main multiball, which we got from shooting the building over and over you can now choose which music track to listen to during it you can pick from seven different tracks, of which five are new tracks that haven't been used before so five whole new music tracks added to Godzilla I guess they're from Jerry Thompson so look forward to listening to those and other than that I suppose there have been quite a lot of changes to the information shown to the player both on the playfield and on the display, quite a few scoring rebalances and changes and a whole bunch more callouts added to Godzilla so a big update to version 1.01 so if you've got that game and haven't installed it yet it certainly sounds like it's something that's worthwhile doing Rush also version 1.01 much smaller update for this there's a few bug fixes, a few rule changes and a new ramp warrior high score entry for whoever hits the most ramps during the game and finally, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1.54 that only had a very few minor tweaks to the game, the game's behaviour and a couple of bug fixes, so we won't say any more about that, and that's the code right, ok, so time to wake up Yeah, so, OK, that rounds it up for Stern Pinball. And, well, without further ado, let's move across the street to Jersey Jack Pinball. Yes, well, we had previously been speculating whether Pat Lawler was in retirement or was taking a break from pinball, or exactly what the situation was. But the news is that Pat has actually officially retired. Yeah, although he did show up at Pinball Expo, much to the surprise of many.
    49:31
    press release or anything like that or no celebration or commemoration of his career in pinball he might have seen a leading party or anything like that but um tended to say that um the patch could still be back with pinball he might not be entirely done with with the game he could come come back out of retirement as people do dance yes that's right but for now officially pat has retired so we wish him a long and happy retirement yeah and apparently he's building a train set in his backyard yes we don't know what size um no guessing it's not a full size but um well you never know i don't know how big his backyard is well i thought it was relatively large but uh that's where uh that's where a very uh well i think that's where jersey jack pimple started up wasn't it working uh working out of those jerseys out of uh pats um back garden That's where they were with it.
    50:30
    Yeah, Wizard of Oz. Yeah. Okay. Well, we finally got to play Toy Story 4. Yes. Anyway, and that wasn't actually at the Pinball Factory, and it wasn't at Pinball Expo either. No, it was at Ankerium, where the game is basically available for location play. and I have to say it plays like butter very smooth shots typical Pat Lawler I would say I remember those smooth shots from Dilding and Willy Wonka as well so very good job I'd say by Pat Lawler I'm not familiar with any of the Toy Story movies I really enjoyed the game because I don't know whether the other movies are maybe better or have more suitable collage or what have you. I just thought it was a really fun pimple to play. So, yeah. Yeah, well, I should mention that Interium is a sort of family entertainment centre. At-cum-restaurant,-cum-bar,-cum-bowling alley.
    51:48
    It's a family entertainment centre, I suppose, is actually the definition of it. But they also have a huge line up of pinball machines there. They have some extra ones brought in for Pinball Expo. This is prior to the Bumper Blast, which was the Wednesday night welcome party. We were there on Monday night, which was the night we arrived. So we were a little bit tired, but it was only a short walk from where we were staying, so we felt we should come over. it was a very good decision, I think, because not only did we get to play Toy Story 4, we also got to meet Ryan McQuade, newly... Of American Pinball. Newly at American Pinball, of the Sonic Spinball game. Scott Denisey was there,
    52:36
    as... He doesn't really need any introduction. And Mark and Erin Seiden were there. Mark was the designer at Jack Pinball now. Yeah, he was the designer. Yes, they moved to the area from the northeast of the US and basically they were there with the others and we were all having a good fun time playing the game. Absolutely, yeah. And then we got invited to Mark and Erin's house for the next evening where they had a league night. And I was able to play Mark's Metroid game, which he has set up in his basement, which is basically the game that got him hired at Jersey Jack Pimble.
    53:20
    Yeah, that's right. So thank Mark and Erin for their hospitality. yeah but getting back to Toy Story 4 yes I enjoyed playing it as well I do agree that the upper left hand corner where that huge great screen is a bit of a dead area as far as gameplay goes and I wasn't I don't know I think it's used quite well that screen but you've also got the 27 inch big LCD in the back box so you do really need that bigger screen on the play field and as far as your comment about it flowing very smoothly, I agree with that the jump ramp the Duke Nukem jump ramp is very very makeable and very lootable as well it's, originally I thought I was going to be a bit like the slam ramp on No Good Gophers and trying to get a hole in one in there and it's going to be virtually impossible but no, it wasn't at all, it was a nice smooth shot and the rest of it yeah, the orbits and the ramps all flowed very nicely. So, yeah, I agree with that, and it looks great. I'm moderately familiar with the Toy Story franchise and I think I was in Toy Story 4 some time ago, but I don't think it was that heavily involved with that particular movie. It's Toy Story, really. It's seen before, but all the characters you know are there and some of the new ones from Toy Story 4 as well. I do like the way they use the posts either side of the jump ramp as well. Yeah, which was actually explained to us during the factory tour that we got on Tuesday. Yeah, so they do pop up when the ramp is active. The ramp on this doesn't drop down from above the playfield, it actually rises up, or pivots up I should say, from the playfield to create a ramp. It was a flap before and then we had a good look at that mechanism, which is also a very impressive piece of design. But there are two pop-up posts by the side, which are used together when the ramp is up, but can also be used individually to block shots on the playfield during other modes. Yes, later on in the game, that was explained to us by Eric. We explained that the post can be controlled individually. Yes, that's right. And I actually saw that in myself when I was playing it, that the post would pop up and inhibit your making of one of the shots. So, yeah, and when they're used for the ramp, it's basically designed to make sure that only shots which are vaguely on target to the ramp go up there, and you don't end up shooting the ball in all directions, smashing plastics and basically sending the ball anywhere at all. It guides you to make the shot that you need to make. So that was good. So anyway, we did mention about the factory tour, which you went on. I was busy back in the hotel setting up for the seminars.
    56:33
    Do you want to go into detail about what you went through? No, I don't. I think I'd rather not relive all the heartache and sleepless nights that I had to try and... I was going to say, I think Martin slept like five hours in a free night. It's something like that. The first night, I'll just briefly say, when we finished at the Enterium, no, it was when we came back from Mark and Aaron's place, that's right, yeah,
    56:59
    we needed to set up, or I needed to set up the laptop and all the cameras and digitizers and stuff that I got for the seminars, which were starting the next day.
    57:10
    And, oh no, it was when we came back from Enterium, it was, wasn't it? Yeah, from the Grumpa Blast party, that's right. Yeah, Wednesday night. Yeah, so we came back and it was about 11 o'clock at night. I was trying to get all this set up and none of it was working. And you could basically get one camera to work and that was about all. You could never get to work at one time. So by about, I don't know, about 1 o'clock in the morning and having to be in the seminar room by 7 the next morning, I just sort of said, oh, you know, blow it. Let's sort it out in the morning and had a sleepless night. Anyway, we got into the seminar room and mostly everything working and all of this. So that wasn't so bad. But I was there doing that and starting the seminars. And you were able to book yourself onto one of the bus rides to the Jersey Jet pinball factory. And have a look. Do you want to give us a little summary of what was going on there? Yeah, sure. I didn't take the tour because I already had the tour I used that time to take pictures of other people taking the tour they had very comfortable bus coaches or whatever you call them comfortable transport to the factory luxury coach I believe the only problem was there was only one bus going at the time and one bus coming back which meant that people had to line up for registration to go on a tour and then they were basically told a time slot like okay you're in the in my case 1115 bus taking off to the factory which eventually turned out to be 1140 so there was already a delay in that and I think there were people still heading out with buses to the factory after one o'clock. If you're expecting to go on a factory tour at 9am and then it turns out to be one o'clock, first of all it messes up your entire day. But Jersey Jack took note of that, so they should have more buses available and also smoother registration so that people can sign up quicker and don't have to wait in line for like, I don't know, half an hour or more, to be told that they're on a bus five hours later. Yeah, it's the sort of thing which you could do online very easily, couldn't you? Yeah, for example, yeah. And well, the factory tours themselves went rather smooth. I saw, I think in each bus, each bus was divided into three groups, which then toured the factory. I think we got a more in-depth tour than the people from the Pinball Expo factory. Yeah.
    60:13
    But, well, Jersey Jack had arranged the tour in such a way, they have two lines. one of them was on purpose not in use so that people could take a look how the process normally how it works and which parts are added to a playfield and so on while the other line was in use so they continued building games and it looked very efficient I should say. But when we were there, they were putting the red tape down to guide people around the factory. Was that used? As far as you saw, because you didn't know if the tape was there. Can't remember. I do recall that I think they were intending a couple of things to do with the factory tour. also to have flyers handed out to people and so on. Not everything worked out the way they envisioned, I would say. I think it was also the plan that they would have promotional plastic for Toy Story 4 at the booth and those apparently didn't show up or someone forgot a box, I don't know. Yeah, it just didn't happen then. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, so I think there's a couple of learning curve moments for Jersey Jack. Obviously, this was the first time they had a factory tour of this large scale coming over. Sure, yeah. I'm pretty sure they will work things out and it will be a lot smoother next year. And they had, what, Jack was there, Steve Ritchie was there, Mark was there. Jim Guarnieri was also present.
    62:11
    Was Eric there? Because I don't see any pictures of him. I think Eric was doing one of the tours. Right. And, yeah. So on the tour that I was on, interestingly, there was a... Well, we had Steve Ritchie and Jack Guarnieri signing flyers separately. So one flyer had a stack of flyers that he had, one was Steve Ritchie. others had the autograph of Jack Guarnieri. You'd think they would pass them along so you had all autographs on the same flyer, but that wasn't the case, so that could mean some streamline. And in the end, I don't think people got these flyers, at least not on the tour that I was on. So people see Steve Ritchie signing these flyers and then they don't get one. And these flyers, they were a reprint of the We Play magazine front cover, is that right? That issue of Replay Magazine had a story, a cover story, all about Toy Story 4 and Dirty Jack Pimple. Yes, it did. And like you said, they printed flyers of that cover as well. I was lucky enough to get a copy of the magazine. And, yeah, it's an interesting article. Okay, well apparently I think over 400 people went on this tour, so if they were going on a bus at a time I guess that's probably what, let's say 40 people on a bus? I probably think like 56 or so. Oh okay, right, so then we're looking at what about 8, 8 or, yeah 8 bus, 8 tour groups, 8 bus floats at a time, so yeah. Okay, so it was quite an undertaking, and thanks to Jersey Jack Pinball for doing that.
    64:06
    I think it's worth noting, I don't think it was actually part of Pinball Expo specifically, was it? You didn't have to have bought a ticket for Pinball Expo to be on the tour. No, but you had to register at Pinball Expo, you had at least to go there. Yeah, to be at the convention. But that registration was outside of the vendor or the show floor, so you didn't have to be a participant of Pinwall Expo to go on the tour. Good. Well, again, thanks to the company for doing that. And obviously it's quite disruptive to their manufacturing, as you said. They had to close down one of their production lines in order to use it as a demonstration tool for part of the tour. So that will have impacted on the company. but nice to see that taking place and for a lot of people it would be their first and for others their one and only chance to look around Jersey Jack Pinball and in case you missed it do check out the coverage on both Martin and my website pinball-magazine.com and pinballnews.com where we both took pictures of the private tour that we got prior to Exxon. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so you'll see a slightly different and maybe a little more originally view of the factory. But at that time, they were certainly getting ready for the show, so they had already shut down one of the production lines and were getting their exhibits ready on the other one so people could see the state of the playfield at various stages. Right. Yeah, and as you said, a big thanks to Eric for showing us around. Yeah, oh, and while we're thanking people, we should also thank Steve Ritchie for inviting us for lunch after our factory tour. Absolutely, and unfortunately we were not able to join him again the next evening at his house, which was something we really wanted to do. Because he realised it was Pinball Expo. Yeah, it was a little bit crazy at that time. But, yeah, okay, so that's, I think that's pretty much wraps up Gears of Jet End War for this month. So, they weren't showing a new game, they were showing their latest game, but we've already seen one new game, and that was from CERN with their GameCon 007. But there was another new game, which, well, not new as such, but it was being shown in public for the first time. Yeah, so which is rather interesting because actually you've seen that game over a year ago. Yes. Making its debut at a Queen Pop-Up Store. Yes, so let's just say that it's Pimble Brothers with their Queen game, which was announced several months ago and was due to make its premiere at the Super Awesome Pimble... Tailgate Party. Tailgate party, that's the word, yes. Tailgate party at Coin Taker, but didn't. But it did turn up at Pinball Brothers stand in Pinball Expo, where they had two machines there. Yeah, initially one, and other games were still in customs, but they managed to get the second game out on the floor, I think the second day of Expo. so they had the standard model and the Rebsody edition as well, which in terms of gameplay don't differ that much it's just the art text it's more cosmetic the changes so we mentioned what you thought about James Bond, what was your opinion of Queen, having played it for the first time Actually, your previous speak was about Toy Story 4. I think you have an entirely different opinion than I do on this game. I found it... it plays very smooth, but it was difficult to control the ball. There's a number of lit up stand up targets which are rather close to the flipper slipper that bounced the ball back so quick that it's really difficult to get long ball times. I think these games were set up for two balls per game and you couldn't do multiple player games. So I think I was done under a minute, I think. Yeah, I'm the same. I actually walked away. I played about three games on it and walked away and thinking, well, I didn't get much fun out of that because everything was all over so quickly, or I just, I shoot a stand-up target and bang, the ball would be gone. Oh, okay, well, I didn't get a chance to save that. That was straight out. I mean, obviously they'd be set up tough and they don't want people playing long ball times on them. Right. But it seemed to be overly difficult and I, there was good and bad, okay, about that. I think the display looked pretty good. I think the animations, the videos they had, the live performances, looked very sharp and bright and clear and seemed very in-keeping. And the graphics which they created themselves looked quite good. I wouldn't say they were brilliant. I thought there was times when there was an awful lot of text on the screen. You're trying to read it to work out what was going on. Because when you first start the game, you've got this kind of rotary selector where you pick the song that you want to play. But there's text written all the way around it. There's text at the top. There's text at the top of the screen. You kind of need to spend about 30 seconds reading it all to work out what it is you're meant to do, which I think is something that needs to be more intuitive. you pick a song and then there were certain things lit it wasn't entirely clear why those things were lit for that song but maybe that would become more clear later what I understood is having talked to various Pimble Brothers I would say I got the feeling that they are still trying to figure out the best direction for the code on this game. It's very early coders, they kept telling me more code is coming and the game will improve heavily, which I can understand and that's how everybody, every manufacturer is doing that these days. But in this case I had the idea or I got the feeling that the vision for the game, the designer has a vision but the designer has a vision, but, and now they're looking how people are giving them feedback on having played the game, whether the vision that they currently went in, or the direction they went in, is the right one, or maybe they should change it. What I found rather, well I'm not sure disappointing is the right word, but let's say you pick Radio Gaga as a song to play, okay, so you start playing the song, you have to make certain shots, or you play the game.
    71:44
    And once you drain a ball, basically you have to pick another song. You can't finish the mode. So I'm not sure how you can really progress in that game. I wouldn't mind continuing in that song mode until I reach the objective that you should reach. Which actually, because the game ball times are so short, would give you, make you play a lot more because every song has different objectives, I think. Well, that kind of ties in with one of the things which I felt about the game was, when I walk up to any new game, I'm asking the question, okay, who am I? What's my role in this game? What am I trying to achieve and why? Okay. And I didn't get any answers to that when I first got it. I picked a song and some shots of it. Right, why? Okay, what's the overall objective? Now, who am I? Am I a member of the band? Am I trying to be a member of the band? Am I a fan? What's my involvement with Queen at this point? And I couldn't get any sort of involvement, emotional attachment to it. It's like, okay, we've missed a bunch of shots.
    73:01
    I don't know why those shots are there as opposed to any others. I don't know what they represent or anything. There were some things in the, obviously there's Wembley Stadium, the old Wembley Stadium model, so that's lit for some things for a multiple feature, and that's fine. I have some comments about that as well. The actual mode itself, when you start a song, I don't know why I, you know, other than being able to change the song and have different shots lit, ones which are more to my liking,
    73:29
    I didn't see any particular reason to pick any specific song. It was interesting though that It doesn't explain this to you in any way But well in any obvious way But I did notice that right at the very top Of the screen It said I forget which song it was but maybe it was Radio Gaga It said Double flip on the beat for extra Points or extra features Right I thought oh ok so you're asking I'm meant to be double flipping with the music am I If I can hear the music that wasn't an obvious feature but once you start reading the screen then there's more information there so there are things in there which are potentially very interesting but I don't think something they should do on every song there should be certain times of songs where you should do that right so well I think you mentioned the word potentially I think this is a game that has a lot of potential but it will come down to the code And besides the code, I did express a couple of suggestions in terms of hardware. I mean, I know, I've known Daniel Jensen of Pimble Brothers for quite some years now, and I was very delighted to meet other people of the team as well. If you look at the playfield layout, of course you have the red special guitar in the upper right corner, which is blocking a lot of your view in that area. As a mini playfield it's a rather difficult one, because I don't think I've seen anybody manage to shoot the captive ball on the guitar neck, because basically you lose your ball way before you can even aim to make a good shot at that. And then there's a metal center ramp which basically looks very dark, like a black vertical bar in the middle of the playfield. I think the game, or the look of the playfield will improve a lot if they change that to a plastic ramp which you can see through, or a wire form, so that you at least have a little bit more visual contact with the ball if it goes under that ramp. And you mentioned that Wembley Stadium sculpts in the back. It's mounted against the back panel. And I understand that it will become rather important later on in the game. And I'm like, why is it? I understand that Queen performed there, but Wembley Stadium itself has nothing to do with Queen. Well, I would argue that it's the home of some of their iconic concerts, and also, of course, the Live Aid event, which they are very well remembered for. I get that, but I was just looking at that sculpt, and I'm like, okay, I don't see why it's there. I mean, they could reduce it in size, in depth, for at least half of it, so it doesn't go forward that much. But they could also completely leave it out, and I wouldn't miss it. Actually, it would probably clear up the upper left corner of the back panel a little bit.
    77:03
    Maybe, but we're in danger of getting into, you know, the Spinal Tap Stonehenge debacle, aren't we? where you have a tiny little model of Wembley Stadium there, rather than being a much more imposing and impressive feature.
    77:18
    I think where it is at the moment looks right. It probably needs better lighting effects on it. It needs spotlights and things pointing at it to really highlight it. And the same with the ramp, I think, that you're talking about, the stainless steel centre ramp. Yeah, it goes up into darkness. You can't really see what's going on back there. almost needs, you know, lights up the side of it, that sort of throw to guide you up it. Right, so, but I don't want to, like I said, the game has a lot of potential and I have to give credit to Pinball Brothers for the way they designed the other side of the playfield with their PCB boards. They have these great PCB boards under the playfield which are screwed right onto the wood, no washers in between because of the inductive switches that they are using on some cases, but it really looks very, very neat. Yeah, well I will just give a blatant plug and say if you ever look at the Pinball News article you will see a picture of the underside of the playfield so you can see for yourself what we're talking about. Yeah, so it looks very, very nice and tidy, I would say.
    78:35
    And that's partly also Patrici Gaming, I suppose, in Italy. That's building the game. Building the game, I suppose, may also be involved in some of the PCB board design and what have you. Maybe not, maybe I'm mistaken, but still, compliments for the way the game is laid out under the playfield. Yeah, we heard the stories many, many times about half a mile of wiring under the playfield. That's not the case in the original game. No, there's about three or four metres of wiring under the playfield on Queen. So, yeah, everything is linked together with ribbon cables between the various PCBs. And as you say, they are flush against the playfield, so it looks very clean and impressive. Congratulations to the mechanical and electrical design for that game. And still I think the game has lots of potential, so I hope they get working on code, and I'm pretty sure that they should be able to turn over some of the people who have been negative about the game so far into N3TS, I would say. One thing I'm... Well, negative about the game, which I'm not sure they're going to be able to change, and I think I've heard this mentioned a good few times, is about the sound call-outs by the band. Actually, I have some news on that, or at least... OK. Go on. It may not be news in the sense that it's not been an official announcement, but I understand that there is the intention to record additional voice calls,
    80:21
    which basically I suggested, OK, get someone to direct them so they don't sound like it's Sunday morning. Yeah, it was very, very flat and unenthusiastic. But, yeah, well, if they can get them re-recorded or replaced, then that would be a major step in making the game more exciting or certainly appear more exciting to the player. But, anyway, we mentioned that before and we don't need to go over it again. It's actually going to change. So, good news. I don't think we have any other news from Pinball Brothers, do we? No, I think that's it for now.
    80:58
    Yeah, let's move on to American Pinball. Okay. Where we, well, we were lucky enough to get a factory tour over there. And I will have an article on that on the Pinball Magazine website. And you also have an article on that on your website. I've got all the pictures already done. I'm just going to put a few words to it, and it will be to be published later today. Right. Okay. Good. And while we were doing that tour, we got a chance to talk to veteran pinball playfield designer Dennis Nordman, who is also the console story in Pinball Magazine No. 2. It was very nice to see Dennis again. He certainly was. He's back in his element designing games. Oh yeah. He's loving it. Well, finally he's hoping to see his games get into production again, because as he told me, I think the past five years he's worked for several companies and none of the games that he designed were actually produced. No, I know, it must be a bit dispiriting. Yeah, so we're looking forward to see a Dennis Dortmund pinball design come out from American Pinball.
    82:23
    We talked about lots and lots of details that we can't go into, so sorry about that. NBA and so on, you know what it's like. But it was great talking to Dennis and his upcoming games. Yeah, I know something which I haven't told you, and which I can tell you now. Because I went back to American Pinball on Tuesday after Pinball Expo. Right. In order to pick up some goodies for our quiz that we're going to be doing at the Dutch Pinball Open. But more about that later. We'll get back to you later on. While I was there, I got a chance to go into the design room and play Dennis' game.
    83:13
    Well, now you're going to spell all the details out. No, I'm not going to say anything about it. And I also got to play another game, which I also can't talk about. But I can say that having flipped Dennis' game, it's a hugely enjoyable game so I think American Pimbaloron is a winner with that one if it plays anything as nicely as the Whitewood I got to try so other than that I can't really say anything else but I have to say that it's on its way ok well teaser, teaser so ok any idea when the rest of the world might see that game I believe, and this is only speculation, that we may well see two games from American Pinball next year.
    84:09
    One around Texas Pinball Festival time and one around Pinball Expo time. Okay. Well, that's interesting. Hmm, that's the hope I believe. Obviously timelines slip as we've seen many times. Well the fighting the issues and whatever Exactly yeah But that what they shooting for at the moment as I understand No pun intended Yes exactly So anyway um Yeah, let's talk about what they did announce at Pinball Expo. They brought, I think, like 12 games to Pinball Expo. Legend of Valhalla, Hot Wheels, Octoberfest, and he was there. Yeah, all four titles were there. They did have flyers for Legend of Valhalla, finally, I would say, because I think that game has been out for like over six months, and so far we didn't have any flyers up to two weeks ago. So are the flyers, are they for the classic edition, which was announced this month?
    85:19
    Actually, I have no idea. I understood originally at the Texas Pimble Festival show that the goal was to do a flyer for two different models, and they wanted to wait until the classic one was available so they could include it.
    85:35
    And I must admit I haven't looked at the flyer that well to know which model it is for. Right, okay, well we're on that subject. This month, October, American Pimble did announce the release of their classic edition of Legends of Alhalla, which is the cheapest model it is, it's a kind of a cost reduced model because some of those custom moulds that they use in those games are hugely expensive for what they are it can easily cost 60, 70, 80 dollars for a single moulded piece and if they can replace that with a similar looking plastic piece which costs 1 dollar or something then that's more money they can either put into the game elsewhere or reduce the cost of the game So that's something which I think they're going to be doing going forward with all their models. I think you might be finding things like Houdini, for instance, will have a classic edition coming out. Well, one of the things I found rather remarkable during our factory tour at the American Pimble, the barrel, the 3D barrel that is being used on the October factory is actually 3D printed. It is, and then hand painted. Yes, and Ryan McQuaid is actually heavily involved in the 3D printing at American Pinball.
    86:58
    So, I wasn't expecting that, but, well, if it works, it works. Well, it is quite a large model, isn't it? It's quite a large item. It would probably take quite a while to print. But, yeah, so they got a couple of 3D printers printing these barrels and other items as well. You mentioned about having a legend about how the flyer went all, but we didn't get to see Scott or Frank from Riot Pinball at all during the show, did we? No, the designers of that game, I was expecting them to be around at Expo, but... Yeah, I thought they might have been at the American Pinball Update seminar as well. I didn't see them, so, oh well. I didn't get to see an awful lot, so I probably don't know whether they were there or not, but I certainly didn't see them anywhere. So maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but we didn't see them. And what else were we going to say? Oh, yeah.
    88:04
    Yes, we talked about the seminar that American Pinball had, their update one, which had a couple of interesting announcements about it. The first of which was that Sophia Ryan was inducted into the Pinball Expo Hall of Fame. She's the senior mechanical designer at American Pinball. And we saw her when we were there. We didn't actually get a chance to be introduced at that time. But she was busy working her way on upcoming titles. And the second announcement, I suppose, of note was that American Pinball are incorporating the Scorebit system into their software to attract people's scores and achievements and to be part of leaderboards. So at the show, it has Hot Wheels games, which had it installed and working already, and had a high-score leaderboard running on a big LCD monitor there. Other games are going to have it added to their software in updates. So it's very much as we were saying earlier about coming down to a stone pinball inside a connected system and everybody else going with the score bit. Which of course it was just a jet pinball have also incorporated into their system. So wait to see whether any other manufacturers decide to put score bit in as well. in the Scott Witt seminar which they had they also mentioned that they are now including virtual pinballs as well although they are treating virtual versions of games as coming from a different manufacturer than the physical version so if you had a say a American pinball Hot Wheels game and a virtual version of Hot Wheels games they would not be comparing the scores on one against the other because there will be different machines, hot wheels, but from different manufacturers. One will be from American, one will be from homebrew. Right, okay. So, now we mentioned that we had a factory tour at American Pinball. One thing that we haven't commented on yet, but we did notice, and it was hard to miss, There were plenty of finished playfields laying all over the factory floor and the storage room floor, stock room floor, whatever you want to call it. Apparently, American Pinball is waiting for cabinets to put these games in. So, I'm not sure whether that has to do with the supply chain issue or whether the supplier of cabinets is just busy with other orders. but plenty of games waiting to be for cabinets to arrive in order to be able to ship down yes all the cabinet art was there, the power supply and everything else was waiting to go in them but really it was just when we were there they were expecting a delivery of cabinets later in the day hopefully they arrived but we don't know how many that was going to be but certainly Yeah, that seemed to be the block on them shipping more games. Yeah, so, other than that the factory looked very neat and impressive. It did, two production lines. Yeah, in a rather small area, I'd say a fifth of what Jersey Jack is using, so to speak. Yes, recently when I visited the factory before it had been refurbished, it was a much larger space than American Pimples, so they were going to set up an entire area and have up to five production lines for short runs and for various extras. But since then, AIMTRON have taken over half the building I think, so they have less space than was anticipated. But even so, they seem to be using it well, and as I said before, it looks very efficient. Yeah. Oh, okay. So I think that's about everything for American Pinball. Yeah, well, we might have David Fitz come on later, I understand, from you. Yeah, that's the aim. And he will be able to talk about the Pinball Expo experience, as well as what's happening in American Pinball. Yeah, so I think it's going to be less than two more podcasts. Yeah, we're not even halfway through yet.
    92:39
    So, let's get moving. A hundred people just turned up there. Spooky pinball. Yes. They were at Expo, which was nice to see. Having previously decided not to. Yes. I didn't see Charlie or Katie, but Buck was there. Yes, he was. with a couple of other people that are part of the Spooky Crew.
    93:07
    They brought a couple of Halloween games. I'm not sure they brought Ultraman. No, they brought two Ultraman games. They had a TNA 2.0. Yeah, which is now called the Collector's Edition. Right, okay.
    93:25
    But that game was at the floor. And I've seen reports that they also started shipping the first collector's editions of Total Nuclear Annihilation. So that game is on the line, and that's good news. I was surprised to see the thickness of the green plastic protectors that are being used on the game. As I think the original run of TNA in some cases also had plastic protectors, which were probably a third of the thickness compared to the ones that they use on the collector's edition. Okay, so maybe that's an upgrade then, perhaps they were getting broken before, and now they're more robust. Right. So just checking my photos, yes, there was a single Halloween machine, two Ultramans, and a TNA collector's edition machine. Right, and the usual spooky stuff. And playfields as well were available. And yeah, I'd say caps, t-shirts, badges, we name it. Yeah. But it was nice to see Buck at the show. It was. He represented properly this time.
    94:32
    Yeah. And I did ask him about the current position of Charlie, his father and a founding member of Spooky Pinball, which it appears that it looks like Charlie stepped down.
    94:55
    And all he would say is that Charlie is enjoying life. Taking a break away from pinball. Away from the company. Maybe, maybe not. It's not like Buck is replacing Charlie. there's a lot of people making decisions so it's not like the Sam Stern, Gary Stern situation from 40 years ago hmm ok but for now Charlie is still involved but also enjoying but wasn't at the show no he was not at the show not that I've seen him not on the speaking stand anyway well we wish him well Oh yeah, we wish everyone well. Absolutely. Okay, did we mention that we've hired a new programmer? Not yet. Oh, okay. Well, let's mention that we've hired a new programmer then. Oh, do you know the name of this new programmer? I believe his name is Matt Kemp, and as I understand it, he'll be working on enhancing the Halloween and Ultraman code initially, and then working on future titles. Yeah, that makes me wonder, did another programmer leave? Because obviously this program can't be picking up code that somebody else already developed. Well, that's the thing about announcements of new hirings. You never get to hear about the people who've left, do you, normally? No. In fact, we hardly even got to hear about Pat Lawler having left. Yeah, I'm not even sure Pat Lawler was that happy with his retirement being announced. Someone stole his left, I don't know.
    96:35
    I what? well if it was on the podcast it must be true ok so I think that's wrapped up Spooky so let's move on to Chicago Gaming they also had a big stand at Pinball Expo where they had ten Captors Canyon machines all different versions with I think three of them having the interactive toppers on I think it was the SE Plus which was the standard edition with the topper and I think they had an LE one there as well which was standalone away from the others Plus they also had a medieval madness, Anamostabash, which we make there as well. So an impressive looking line-up from Chicago Gaming. And we kept asking Ryan if there was going to be any announcement about a new title. And he insisted that there wouldn't be. And he was right. So there would be. Yeah, we were expecting this potential Mark Ritchie game. But no, he didn't want to talk about it. He knew he had no idea what I was talking about. All he said, I'm here with Cactus Canyon. And he was. Yes, lots of them. It was a nice line up and they were busy all throughout the show. Yeah. I understand it. Rather disturbing news I found it actually to see on Facebook that they are looking for a pit bull technician. Oh, where are you going to find one of those? Well, probably in the Chicago area I suppose, but if you're a manufacturer and you're looking for a technician to fix your own games, I'm not sure whether that's a good sign or a signal that you want to be, that people get the impression that your games need a technician. Yeah, I guess it depends what the technician's role is, if it is fixing games or working on developing new ones. But yeah, a fairly vague job description, I'd say there. Yeah, yes. So I don't suppose I have too much of a problem finding one, but pinball technicians are not as easily found as they used to be, are they? No. Well, it's a dying breed, apparently. Although, with pinball gaining in popularity, more people must become technicians in some way. Yeah, well, listening to Mike Benjamin from Enterium talking in his seminar at Pinball Expo, he was saying one of the things that any family entertainment centre or similar that wants to operate pinball definitely needs is a dedicated pinball technician. So maybe it's a job that's on the rise again and making a comeback. Yeah, so one of the rumors going around for Chicago Gaming has to do with the Cactus Canyon. I think last month we reported that the limited edition games were scheduled to start being delivered in, I think, the next couple of weeks.
    99:36
    And that has been delayed again by four to six weeks. Right, where's that news come from? Well, apparently that news is coming from the Game Room guys, who are a distributor for Chicago Gaming. So they must have been informed that this could either be related to their order, or it could be just a general situation. Sounds like supply chain issues to me, but you never know. The problem is, if you can't get one part, you can't finish the game. Yeah, as I often say, it's the most important part of the game. The game is the one you can't get. Yeah, and I'm not sure whether this is topper-related or game-related. Obviously, they had games at the show floor, but if these games are supposed to come with a topper and you can't finish the topper, then what are you going to do? Well, I could always ship that later, I suppose, if that was an option. But yes, obviously none of these companies want to say that they are suffering badly with supply chain issues, and everybody's saying that the supply chain delays are improving, which I'm sure they are, they're what they used to be. But there's no doubt that companies are still suffering to one degree or another. And we're seeing this all over the place. And it could just be that it's a handy thing to blame delays on, where it could actually be maybe the software is not finished or they're having some technical issues with the manufacturing to then say, oh, well, we've got supply chain issues. But we have seen in general that supplies are a problem for every manufacturer to some degree or another. Well, we're just in with American Bimble cabinets in this case. Yeah, well, you know, different companies react in different ways. Companies like Stern, for instance, if they can't get the parts for, I don't know, Jurassic Park, they can go and make something else instead. Can't they?
    101:41
    Everybody has a luxury. No, exactly. No, that's why we see the impact being different across different firms. But anyway, enough speculation and pontificating about the potential delay for the limited edition of Cactus Canyon Remake. I think that wraps it up for Chicago Games, so let's move on to some good news from your side of the water, and some interesting updates coming from Dutch Pinball for the Big Lebowski. Yeah, they finally released their version 1.00 for the Big Lebowski, which is a huge update.
    102:24
    And one that impacts the game in multiple ways. Of course, many were wondering when the wizard mode would be available. Well, that has now been fully implemented. the dude buys wizard mode. But they also made the wizard's goals much more reachable.
    102:53
    They also added a bowling ball perk and full bowling scoring and high scores. New bowling challenges. There's a multi-ball playfield multiplier which goes up to 5x. That sounds like a game changer by itself. right and so there's a side character jackpots more mystery awards divided over three levels new call outs new music new sound new animation and clips well everything I've seen posted about this people have been rapidizing about that one of the huge and amazing update it is now it totally changes the game so congratulations to Barry and Coon and the whole team that touched pinball. Yeah, and while we're speaking of Dutch pinball, let me quickly bring up the upcoming Dutch pinball Open, which will be held the 11th to the 13th of November in the Dutch Pinball Museum in Rotterdam. I know that's three times Dutch pinball in various capacity.
    104:06
    So, Dutch Pimble will be providing prizes for our quiz to win. So if you want to win Dutch pinball goodies, make sure you're a participant in our So You Think You Know Pinball quiz at the Dutch Pinball Open. Sounds great. I must be there.
    104:24
    Well, you've got to be there. We're doing this together. Ah, right. Okay. I'll definitely have to be there then. Yes. So we're doing it twice. Is that right?
    104:34
    On Saturday? Yeah, well, probably. We've been asked to do multiple quizzes, and we'll still have to see whether there's going to be two quizzes, or maybe we can even do four, depending on the amount of prizes that we can give away. And we just do shorter rounds, so we'll get an answer right here using a pillow machine. Yeah, I realize we might have to actually come up with some questions at some point. Yeah. Okay. We'll get to that. Yeah, just put an eye out there, you know, because... And they have to be different for all the quizzes, because some people are sneaking into more than one. Multiple rounds of quizzes from the past few years that we can use questions from, I suppose. Yeah, I guess so. Better make sure they're all up to date, though. Things change in the pinball world, and we're here to report on them. So, great news from Dutch Pinball. We look forward to playing version 1.0 of the Vigabowski at the Dutch Pinball Open Expo.
    105:38
    And also, as you say, thanks for the prizes in advance for our quiz. So anyway, Dutch Pinball, of course, use the Multimorphic P3 system for their game. So let's go and talk about what's happening at Multimorphic. Oh, what a bridge that was. Hey, come on. Oh.
    106:05
    Very subtle, I guess. Well, first of all, congratulations are in order to Jerry, Jerry Sternenberg, the founder of Multimorphic, and his girlfriend, wife, I'm not sure what it is. Partner. Yeah, partner. for welcoming their first child, Andrew Parker. Parker Andrew.
    106:32
    Yes. I think it was, yeah, we did have it written down, but I seem to have mangled it somehow in all of it. Parker Andrew.
    106:43
    So congratulations. He was born the Wednesday of the Pinball Expo, So that explains why Jerry was not at Pinball Express. No, I don't think they were actually planning to be there themselves. They were represented by one of their distributors, which is a rather strange company,
    107:05
    but they are the distributors for Multimorphic, and they had some P3 games, a couple of P3 games on their stand. They were really sort of like a camping, I thought, a camping or touring company. The exact name of which escapes me at the moment, but it was something like Wise Trader or something like that. But they were, yeah, they had two P3 machines set up, one with Weird Al and the, I forget what was on the other one, but they also had some, quite a few of the playfield modules set up for people to look at so you get a good view of how these module work. Yeah, so yeah, interesting booth, so to speak. Yeah. But other than being represented at Pinball Expo, Multimorphic also sent out an update, rather lengthy one, I would say, for which we will basically bring you the highlights. They are expanding the team with production workers and so on, but at the same time the number of orders keep increasing for the games to be built, resulting in the lead times, it still takes 12 to 13 months before your order will be completed. That's for complete games, if I should stress. Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, complete P3 machines, not the modules. They still have a lead time, but I think they're only in the order of a few months for those. Yeah, but they're still expanding and they plan on expanding even more other than family members. And yeah, if you have multiple game kits on order, including Weird Al, they're planning to get you to do Weird Al game kits first and then other game kits will be sent over after that. Yeah, as soon as they're ready. Yeah. And they are also working, while they are still building existing titles, they're still working on the development of new titles and they're looking to release two new full-featured game kits for next year. So we got two new titles coming up from Milton Wattage. No indication whether those will each have their own unique playfield modules or they'll reuse existing ones. Yeah, although I'm expecting them to be new playfield modules, instead of new rules or new software for existing ones. But I might be wrong. Yeah, well, they've obviously already got quite a large number of different playfield modules out.
    110:25
    I think what they tend to do is to produce their own game and playfield module as a kit and then rely on third parties to produce new versions of software or new games to run on existing modules. That seems to be all. Or third party or not sort of like, I don't want to use the word cornerstone because that's associated with Stern, but their own primary titles always seem to have new modules, while other people work on re-theming them. Yes, okay.
    111:03
    Oh well. Yes, good news for Multimorphic. They are working on the order coming in, and those are increasing, so a healthy company. Yeah, as people get to experience the game more, they're ordering them themselves. So they seem to be, I don't want to say a victim of their own success, but they seem to be successful. Put it that way, which is great.
    111:32
    Right, okay. So now we get to the part where we have companies that's not that much to talk about. So let's quickly go through them so we can finally move to our interview with David Fix. Yeah, okay, so let's go with the Spinal Tap game that we were talking about before from Home Pin, which appeared at the Pin Fest show in Australia. In Newcastle. In Newcastle, indeed. And since then, it's all gone a bit quiet, but the game has now turned up at the Pimble Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, where you can go and play it for $1 per game. Wow, okay. Well, Pimble Hall of Fame always uses the... that you have to pay for the games that you play, so that's not unusual. Absolutely. But the price varies depending on what title it is. The older games are over, like, 25 cents a pop, and some of the newer ones are $1. And Home Pin's final... this is final tap game, is there now. So if you've been 18 to play... So if you've been 18 to play, then... Now it's open in Las Vegas. Yeah, if you're not already there. Yeah, so I was surprised the game is in Las Vegas, but it wasn't at Pinball Expo. Yes, that was a bit surprising. Missed opportunity a year, maybe. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Yeah, well, so no other news from HomePin other than posting some pictures about parts for standard targets being manufactured by a third party. Not that interesting to me. Okay, so let's move on. Yeah, Haggis Pinball. Haggis, yes. No news. No. But they did have a Fathom Mermaid Edition game at the Pinball Expo for, and I have to say that game looked really, really good. You know what? I didn't even clock it. I mean, I may have noticed that there was a beautiful-looking Fathom there, but I didn't particularly notice that it was there. In the fast pinball stage. Ah, right. Okay, I did see it then. Yes. Okay. I wasn't sure whether that was theirs or whether that was somebody else's that had done an immersion of Fathom.
    113:45
    No, that's the Haggis one, which is actually running on a fast pinball board. Aha. So that explains why it was in their booth. Absolutely, yeah. But seriously, the game looked amazing. Yes, I agree. I mean, I saw it from a distance and I thought that looked amazing. I didn't get a chance to go in and even see what the games were that they had there. I took some pictures and some video of it as I was going past, but that's as far as I got. So, well, well done. It was also my first time at the Franz Pimmel booth to get a quick play at Funhaus 2.0, which is a kit that is made available by Pedretti Games in Italy. Yeah. And, yeah, that was fun. I enjoyed playing that. So it's a different experience, but it's still fun. I'm also very good on them. And, well, speaking of Pedretti, who are also manufacturing, the manufacturing party of Pinball Brothers, they are looking to contribute to our quiz with maybe some caps and T-shirts and what have you. So if you're interested in winning some of those, then make sure to attend the Dutch Pinball Open and participate in our So You Think You Know Pinball quiz. Yeah, all free, and we have all prizes. All prizes have to go, pretty much. So whatever we've got, we'll give away. Yeah, we don't want to take anything back. No, that's right. So if you want to win it, come along. Anyway, be nice. You're in with a very good chance, because it's only a 50-50 chance on every single question. So if you just get a few right in a row, then you probably won a prize. Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so of the two of us, You have been the one who has been mostly interested in what's happening with the Deep Root Pinball story. Any news on that? Well, I haven't been paying a lot of attention, to be honest, over the last month. I've been so busy giving up with the Pinball Expo trip and getting everything sorted out for that and writing reports that I just had a quick look and it looks like it's just carrying on and on and on. I don't see any major new developments other than the fact that the bankruptcy lawyers have been applying for legal fees, which so far are totaling more than a quarter of a million dollars.
    116:11
    That's a bankruptcy across all the deep food companies, not just deep food pinball. So there is some money, obviously. There was some items sold.
    116:23
    Life insurance policies were sold as well, I think, for around about a million dollars. so there was money to be made from the bankruptcy. But also there were some weird documents posted on Pinside, which I have to thank Blueberry Johnson for that, and saying that there have been payouts to some claimants, which appear to have happened after the bankruptcy was announced,
    116:51
    which I think the bankruptcy lawyers are looking to try and claim back, which included one particular investor who appears to have got back more money than she invested, which must make her pretty much unique in anything to do with Deep Root. I think everybody lost money except apparently this one investor, so good luck to her. Good investments. Yeah, indeed. But now I think the bankruptcy lawyers are trying to get that reversed.
    117:21
    Other than that, I'm going to have to do a bit of catching up now to find out what we missed over the past couple of weeks but I don't think there's been that much going on and it's mostly fairly boring from what I can tell. Right okay so moving on to Canada Simple Adventures. Yes you've been doing a bit of research there. Yeah interestingly enough I well they post their updates on Instagram as the only social media it appears. Oddly enough I couldn't find a lot of other posts that I was expecting to see. It was rather recent what I could find. Quite a few videos of certain modes and what you have to do in the GamePunny factory to achieve those. But, well, they did mention that the code for Punny Factory is done and that bug testing has begun.
    118:26
    From the videos, what I could see, okay, you see the screen or a playfield and a mode starts, and I'm sure they were rolling a ball by hand to indicate what shots need to be made. Code might be done, but choreography wise, I think there is a lot to be gained, as it came across to me as rather slow, lots of stop and go, speed up the game a little bit, you know. But that's up to them. I found it rather disappointing they were not present at Pinball Expo. So, and the only thing that might explain why they were not there is that they just announced that Pony Factory, which I think we have been talking about for probably two years, will be scheduled for release on December 1st. So, we might get back to that on our next pincast, although that will be looking back at the month of November. But I'm curious to see whether this will be a full-on release, and whether games will be available to play or to order, and what have you. Yeah, and where from? That's as well as the other question. If you want to buy one, where are you going to get it from? Right, so, and, well, I suppose that's all the news from Pimble Adventures for now, but hopefully soon we get to play the game. Well, it is interesting that they seem to have gone back to being, been working on Polyfactory. Last time we were discussing why that game seems to have been shelved, and they seem to be giving all the attention to Elements for their next title. Which is the next title, but, yeah. In fact, we should get another game. So, good news. Let's get that released and let's have a look. Let's play it.
    120:30
    Right. Okay, and then, well, here's a company that we don't talk about that often. They're working on a game, but they're not that visible news-wise, I would say. Okay, so I guess we're talking about Circus Maximus, and their planned Kingpin project. Is that right? That is correct indeed. Okay. Well, you've been talking to James Lossman of Circus. Yeah, it was very nice to see James. Yeah, I saw him.
    121:01
    He sent me an email a week prior to Pinball Expo informing me that Georgiana Cunningham had passed away at the age of 82. I was sorry to hear that. And my condolences to the Cunningham family. Oh, it was Jean Cunningham's wife, yes? Yes, indeed. So, and I then ran into James at Pinball Expo. We had had a brief email correspondence a couple of months ago. At some point we mentioned there was no news on Kingpin and he got a bit upset and was like, well, you didn't ask. That's true. We didn't ask. We went with what we could find online.
    121:49
    As it turned out, James has been involved in a dirt bike accident a couple of months ago, which has caused him to heal, I suppose.
    122:05
    He mentioned he broke a couple of things in his back. I'm not sure exactly what. Yeah, definitely not Gerudo. It took him quite a few months to recover from that. And besides that, he's still dealing with court cases regarding the sister of Python, Angelo.
    122:31
    Python has already been gone for a couple of years. but his sister is still prosecuting James for whatever reason hopefully that will come to an end this month at least James is hoping it will be because so far I think she lost every court case that she attempted against James hopefully this will be the last one and then he can leave her behind him. Yes, moving on, get the project back on track. Yeah, exactly. So, and, well, it's a good thing that James was in Expo, which is telling me that his recovery went rather quickly, I suppose, although it still took out months of the project. he hopes to get his groove back in the project it's certainly not a dead project but he needs to get into his own yeah he needs some impetus behind it to get it moving again yeah that's what happens when these things stall for too long but so well best wishes to him both on his full recovery from his back injury and also in getting back into working on Kingpin because that's something we'd all like to see happen again I'm sure Yeah, so there was some other news regarding Kingpin and he mentioned he's still looking for some files but he might have found someone that actually is in the possession of certain files that he's looking for and he was able to make a contact at Expo that could connect him to that person So hopefully that will result in a much quicker, what's the word? Rhythm? Where they land off and moving on. Anyway, sorry for my boring. No, that's all right. We got the gist.
    124:45
    Right, so I think that's it for the Kingpin Project from Socus Maximus. So, I think we can pretty much say for any other company that we haven't mentioned, there's been no news. There's no news that we're aware of this month. Yeah. Although we did mention Pedretti Gaming. We did. I completely forgot to mention there was a code update for FNAF 2.0, which is now version 0.99. So that sounds like almost done. Right. And, yeah, one of the seminars at Bimble Expo had Mark Silk. who was the voice of Rudy when that came. And he was talking about how he got the gig, basically, and the various ideas he offered up and what the company went with. So, yes, that's definitely worth a very entertaining seminar from Mark, so I recommend you watch that if you weren't there in person for it. Right. Now, before we move on to David's picks, there is well the other news that we would like to discuss is the Dutch Pinball Open Expo taking place this month special guests will be Eric Meunier and Jean-Paul De Wijn of Jersey Jack Pinball and well it's not I've only asked and I'm not sure whether it will happen but there is the possibility that Jack Meunier might be joining them as well Cool. But that all depends on how affordable flights are and so on. JJP takeover of the TPO. Yeah. Well, why not? Well, indeed, why not? I mean, Jean-Paul is doing a great contribution to JJP, so... Yes, and... In Dutch we have a hand in everything. And Jean-Paul De Win, another speaker at Pinball Expo, just talking about the art of JJP. Yeah and the development of the user interface on the games Yeah he was there with Mark Molitor and Tony Alzi Yes, very interesting seminar I think. I think you know where you can watch it by now. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, so, but speaking of watching, there is this movie about the Roger Sharpe story, so to speak, Pinball, the man who saved the game.
    127:19
    That movie has been played at several film festivals, right? Yes, in the US. Where it has been very well received. Indeed, it's won several awards, including the Audience Choice Awards. so I think it seems a very professional and entertaining production so congratulations to everybody involved in that including Mr. Rodgers Sharp of course who is on a section of Whose Life the movie is based and who is the executive producer and who also did a seminar at Inboard Expo where he talked about it and showed a short clip from it which unfortunately is not licensed for reproduction on YouTube. Which is too bad, because I was really impressed with that clip. The actual cinematography on it and the quality of the production. Oh, yeah. But also the editing, everything is top-notch. And I found it very interesting to see that we see Roger Sharp being portrayed by an older actor commenting on young Roger Sharp as he is playing pinball. And that's sort of how the movie is put together, where old Roger Sharp is explaining certain situations from back in the day for the audience that might not be aware of pinball. Yeah, it's almost a little bit like, kind of reminding me of the Big Lebowski, where you've got the old guy sitting at the bar, giving out pearls of wisdom about the story that we're seeing unfold in front of us. That was a reminder for me, but in this case it's two different versions of the same person, a younger and older version. but seriously I was very impressed with it and well you were at the seminar as well I indicated I wanted to ask Roger to play the clip again which eventually he did but someone else beat me to it so I wasn't the only one that was very impressed with it and wanted Roger to play it twice the whole audience wanted to see it again because they were certainly liking what they were seeing and looking forward to seeing the full length movie which I am lucky to be yeah you lucky yes this very Saturday we're recording this on Wednesday and this Saturday Christina and I will be going to the closing night of the Rain Dance Film Festival in London and the pinball the man who saved the game is the closing film for that right And after it, there will be a Q&A session, which I know at least Roger Sharp will be there. I don't know if anybody else is going to be there from the movie, either the directors or any of the cast members or anything, but I'll have a chance to see Roger again, although I spoke to him, obviously, at an expo too. But it'll be interesting to see what a, I'm guessing, a less pinball-focused audience makes of the story, of that particular part of his life. Well, we look forward to hearing from you. Yeah, I'll be doing a review of the movie. Right, so, okay. So, I suppose we're, well, this is a wrap-up of the news of last month. Yeah. But we still have day six before. We do. We need to speak about the people at Expo and find out what's happening. I am... well you might be familiar with this ring thing Oh no, not now I am Gary Farrell calling in Well we've got to speak to David OK We've got to see whether he can update us on what's been going on post expo and American Pinball as well Oh well, I guess that's more important Yeah, I'll just... Apologies to Gary, can't take your call right now but I'll call back if there's anything Let's see if we can get to him after the interview. Right, okay. So we are joined now live by David Bix and Rob Burke from Pinball Expo Organizers. Oh, man, you two must be absolutely shattered after all the work you put into Pinball Expo this year. Yeah, and before you comment on that, allow me to take congratulations on such a great event.
    132:03
    Thank you, guys. We had a lot of fun putting it on. I know my wife especially had incredibly long hours every single night until 2 in the morning. Yeah, she was always around. Whenever I went into the hall, she was always there organizing things. That's why she likes that candy. It keeps her awake. I guess. Well, let me also thank you, Martin, and you, Jonathan, also for all your dedication, your help with the seminars and the audio. Wonderful. And everything. You guys did an outstanding job. So, listen, it's just not Rob and I, but it's a whole team of people, and Johnson and Martin, you both, thank you very much for all your day. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. It was mostly Martin's work. I only tried to help out where I could, and he wouldn't let me do much.
    132:52
    Still, it was hugely appreciated anyway. But so now it's all over, and I assume it's all over. Does the work of tidying up from this year's show still continue? No, we've got it tidied up, but we're still having meetings. We're talking about, you know, good parts of the show that we had, what we're going to be doing next year. Rob's got some great ideas already. He's like, how do we make this show better, right? And we've already had some good feedback from a lot of people, including you and Jonathan. So, you know, thank you for that. And we continue to build, you know. It's a pain in the ass of love for Rob and I. You know, Martin, the one thing for me was, let's face it, I've been here since day one, so I've seen the show, you know, go in those ups and downs. But, you know, you never like to hear the negative. And there was negative last year, and I think one reason was people didn't like the cement floors, for instance.
    133:48
    So I didn't hear a single complaint this year. So I guess, like anything else, people are used to a certain culture and climate of a show. And it was different, because they were used to the hotel environment, it's carpeting everywhere and so forth but what pleased me the most was the fact that we didn't hear that negativity this year as a matter of fact I never had so much positive feedback from just about everyone we talked to including yourselves and people from all over the world and this was our greatest turnout to date of international attendees so that's something we always talk about the international guys had a lot of color to the show and they had some very interesting talks in my opinion Oscar to give a talk on the Spanish pinball that was very informative they covered like 50% of the international guests I suppose yeah you're right the Spanish delegation there was like what 25 of them yes always as many as you Dutch guys you know pinball is international we've hit the international community now and guess what everyone's getting along everyone enjoys each other's company and it's getting, we're bringing the kindness together in a good way, so it's fun. Absolutely. Now this was the, this year we brought all the free play machines into the same room as the vendors and into having them all as one single, one single home. Right. That seemed to be very successful from my point of view. Yeah, very well. What was the feedback you were getting? Very well. Very good. Well, the one thing I think, I, you know, I think that we came across great. I looked at different aspects of how we could make it better. So next year, instead of having, like, two banks of EMs next to each other, we're going to have some solid states and EMs. You know, we're going to mix it up an awful lot so that, you know, it draws everybody, you know. Right. Yeah.
    135:50
    But for the most part, the show was very well received. The games mixed in. People loved it. It kept people moving around. It was a hit of the show. I mean, we did a lot of, I've been watching a lot of people's reviews of the show, right? I've been watching them as their walkthroughs. I saw yours, Martin. I saw other people's walkthroughs. And it's just like every time I saw people there, all the vendors have gotten back to me, and quite a few of them, have basically shared that they had constant flow of people. So even though it's a big room, 60,000 square feet, we kept it pretty hustling, pretty good. Yeah, and one of the things which I found on the few times I was able to actually get into the hole was it never ever seemed crowded, whereas back in the West End, it pretty much always seemed crowded in various areas. So while I thought, well, that's great, I have no problem getting on any games, or at least a game if I want to have a game of pinball or if I want to get to anywhere else in the hall there's no issue doing that but I was almost concerned that it was too quiet how were the numbers for you?
    137:04
    this is our largest tennis today by far is it really? wow yeah that ball just follows people up I think you've got to remember one thing first of all we had that wall last year So that wall kind of divided the people.
    137:20
    So we don't know about that wall. We haven't seen it. So that wall, that's right. So that wall opened up 70,000 square feet. So it gets even more interesting. Two years from now, we're pulling down the third wall. We're going to 100,000 square feet. You're taking over the third hole as well. Yeah. Where is the gardening show going? because I need to get my gardening equipment. I know. Well, I had some of our attendees popped over to the gardening show, and they were just like, what's going on in this show? And they said they were being, the attendees of our shows were being swarmed by the gardener people because they were like, there's nobody in this show. So, unfortunately, we threw, you know, people were going to the gardening show, and said, oh, there's a pinball show. I'm going to go to that one instead, I think.
    138:14
    It was very well attended. Very well. You know, guys, what makes it fun for Dave and I is just the team we put together. And we're all able to connect. We're all able to talk. We're all able to brainstorm. And it really helps make for a cohesive team that allows these shows to get off with little or no hits. And we've been very fortunate. and you guys like Dave alluded to you guys are part of that team because it's integral part very integral part just to give people an idea of exactly the scale of this show how many people roughly I mean it's very difficult to put exact numbers on how many people roughly would you say are part of the organizing team for Pinball Extra oh the organizing team? yeah I think it's over 20 it's not easy more maybe close to 30 right now. Those are the people who are in the planning stage of the show, yeah? Yes. As it gets closer to the show, more and more people are incorporated because the needs increase as we're realizing any shortcomings we have. Plus, you've got to imagine, guys, think about this. We pulled over 100 games that we brought to the show for my collection. So the amount of manpower just to pull all this stuff down and get it all scrutinized, that was a job in itself. Plus, I think we did different this year. We had those 100 games set up in my soon-to-be museum, so we would play those games for two and three months just to try to get all the buzz out of them so that when it got to the show, you know, the game had gone through a cycle and we hopefully had figured out all the issues and problems we'd be having. So it wasn't near the issues we had in the past. That's great. I was going to ask you about that because I thought, well, you must have quite a lot of these games in storage, so it must be a huge maintenance job to get them all fixed before the show like that. Yeah, so, you know, there's so many hours behind the scenes. The only guys that do these shows realize is the hours and hours behind it. Plus, you've got to admit, guys, you know, from my perspective, all the seminars that we put together, it was back wall to wall. 60 hours of seminars which is unbelievable but we pulled it off we even had Dave Fix on a seminar that was and then you all said Dave Fix run all the way downstairs grab an award run all the way back up and be totally out of breath to give an award out and everybody's sitting there going Dave take a breath I was going to ask you Dave about that because how is it You're wearing, I was going to say, two hats, but I'm sure there's many more hats than that, in being an extra organized and also looking after the American Pinball side of things as well. Is that manageable for you, or do you need more help?
    141:21
    Well, we got more help this year. We had, you know, let me call out some helpers here that really help. I mean, we had Michael, Patrick, and Nick. Patrick and Michael are Rob's guys who help organize the free play games to the point that they had them in nice rows we had Frank and Jeff my guys from New York who come in normally and they've helped me in the past they helped a lot with the vendors and so forth so that's a good chunk of people that we had there you kind of remember Jeff Oler running around taking video of everybody and promoting it to death.
    142:00
    There are a few hats that I wear, but you know what? As a team, Rob and I, we've worked together great through the years. So, you know, this is just the Rob and Dave show. You know, it's one of those fun things. And I'm still young enough that if it needs to be to jump one whole floor, go all the way to the exhibit hall to grab an award for a vendor, and then jump all the way back up the stairs, I can do that. my heart doctor might say, hey, you might want to slow down on doing this, but, you know, right now I can still do it. But there are many people who have stepped up over the last couple of years that have absolutely been stellar for helping them. And listen, if it's not Trent and Debra and Troy helping out with the tournaments, you know, I mean, like I said, this is not a small team for Expo. This is a good team, and these people have put in their heart and soul for bringing this together. And it's many years of long work, too, so it's a good team. So I'm happy about it. For me personally, some of the highlights were the Wednesday night interium visit. Oh, yeah. And that place was just packed. But there was food there because people said last year the food was so-so because they were right on the concession stand. Well, this year we're down at the interium, and they had a great variety of food. They had a massive variety of games, not only pinball but arcade, and they had the bowling alley there. I mean, there was so much energy in that room. It was almost like being, you know, at the Expo Hall. But that, I thought, went very well. Well, and the other thing about interior, let's just talk about it, guys. This is a location that is up and coming in the Chicago area where they have tournaments every month. In fact, last night they had their tournament right after Expo, and they had over 60 people in this monthly tournament that they have on the first Tuesday of every night. Mike and I are good friends, and, you know, putting the bumper blast there was kind of a brainchild of both of us, and we kind of just, like, even sat down going, okay, this is what we're going to do next month. This is what we're going to do the next time. We want to make the free play area a little bit bigger for the pins that are in there, so we're going to talk about that. But, you know, he had over 600 people. I think that's the biggest bumper blast attendees that we've ever had. Right, Rob? Oh, yeah, crazy big. It's crazy big, 600 people just from all over the place. Gary Stern was there having drinks with people. I was there having drinks with people. You know, J.J.P. was there. So, I mean, this is a location, you know, that bumper blast just took off.
    144:46
    And also have that tournament. That tournament had over, what, 100 players? just in the tournament alone, so that was huge.
    144:53
    What else is fun for me, guys, is seeing all the different manufacturers that were a part of the show this year, including the Pinball Brothers. Like, Sweden is a guy, I think. Yeah. So, I mean, for them to come all the way out there and get a 20 by 20 booth and fill it up, I mean, their games are very well received. to see Queen and Alien. These are games you don't see every day, of course. But it was cool to see them. Spooky, Return to Expo. I hope we had a good time there. And then American Pinball was their greatest play. By the way, Dave, I've got to tell you, I like how you laid those games out. It was kind of cool. Thank you. I had them at an angle, like a game from both sides leading to a point. I thought that was cool. Yeah. So allow me to ask both you, Rob, and David, as organizers of this show.
    145:50
    Obviously, there's a lot going on, and you have to run from A to B to C to make sure that everything is running smooth. Do you actually get to enjoy the show during the show? Because I can imagine that you hardly have any time to play a game or anything. that's a great point I'll go real quick David and then you go but from my perspective the team is getting stronger and stronger to the point where actually at least from my perspective I got a few minutes to get a breather but you know a lot of my time has been putting fires out like it is with Dave but also when it's not it's just walking around and thanking the vendors for being there so that was my fun time and then like you guys you're alluding to, you don't even know who's there until you actually see the booze they had until you had this stuff. I mean, that's pretty cool. I mean, the one guy that came this year was a guy named the Pinball Wizard. He was a kind of Jew. Yeah. And no one really heard about him, but they came and they couldn't thank me enough. Boy, this was a great show for us, but a great awakening to the size of this pinball community because they had never been to a show. They have a mail order. Oh, the other people with it. Yes, the other people with it, yes. Yes. They have an Internet business. They're everything from boards, sugar boards, you name it. And they were very, very pleased. So those are the kind of fun stories I like. That's the personal satisfaction that I got. What about you, David? For me, listen, so I get personal satisfaction just meeting up with people, you know, introducing, you know, bringing new people into the Pinball Expo experience. I've always enjoyed it. I used to love to sit through all the seminars. I used to do all the seminars with Martin doing all the TV and audio stuff. And listen, Martin, you did a stellar job as always. I mean, I love getting comments from people who said, we wish all the shows did the AV like Expo does. and I'm like well there's a hats off to Martin and Johnson for what they did there but I also get enjoyment out of just you know associating and getting people there and putting out the fires and trying to put this together listen yes I am the executive vice president of American Pinball but that doesn't mean that I don't help out with the show so I'll just give you a little side note Pinball Brothers contacted Expo a week and a half before the show, they were in trouble, and they were trying to get things shipped, and I said to Daniel directly, I said, hey, just ship them to American Pinball directly. I'll receive them. We have better dock hours. We don't have to charge you. And I'll just bring them to the show with my truck, and we'll drop them off in your booth. And guys, we'll just take care of it for you. And I think they were shocked that another manufacturer would jump through the hoop and help them. But, you know, at the end of the day, we're trying to make the show great, right? So, I mean, I helped out J.J.P. in some spots. We've, you know, Chicago Gaming, Spooky. I mean, we want to band together for the love of the game. And that's just, you know, even Jack can put a little something in there that I run around. But even though I work for another manufacturer, I'm still flexible and want to make sure that this show succeeds. you know for me also guys real briefly but I was excited about the World Cup it's something that's always jumped us doing this World Cup tournament and we had 10 different countries compete so that to me was really fun but the Americans blew everyone away so I'm hoping people listening to this broadcast will say the Americans will not win I'll be back for you guys to come here and really show the players that America isn't always the top dog.
    150:01
    And I was hoping that someone would give him a hard time, but it was fun. It was an international tournament, which is what I really wanted, and I hope to expand on that. Dave, I was even thinking about increasing the purse to get more people to enter, but I enjoyed seeing that. And I think one other thing I want to talk about was the Walter Day card giveaway, recognizing some of the superstars in this hobby.
    150:29
    And I think that went over very, very well. The people that got it were very pleased and very happy to see them. And I have to say, I don't know where Walter found it, but somehow a box of my superstars from 2015 showed up at the show, which I thought was lost forever. I thought they only made like 10 of them and gave them to me. But I get people coming up going, hey, I'm on this card. I'm like, where did you find that? I mean, they're very rare. But, yeah, thanks to Walter and the rest of the team for, you know, making the superstars and those people who jump through hoops and, you know, are really doing some beautiful things with their games. Hey, Dave. Yes. I'm Martin and Jonathan. I have about five minutes, but I want Dave to mention something now because this is something that he had the brainchild. because I'm going to have him talk about it more so than myself, and that's the homebrew section. Oh, wow.
    151:22
    The homebrew section. Fifteen, almost sixteen guys. Unbelievable demand of talent and the people that brought stuff. Not only that, we had Fast Pinball come in, and it was interesting for me. I don't know if you guys remember. Do you remember Brian Cox? Oh, yeah. He was a young guy that was designing homebrewers. Jupiter Crush. Jupiter Crush, Chantum, Misty, Retro Spa.
    151:51
    Seattle. Seattle area. He had been out of it for a little bit, you know, and I had reached out to him when I first started at American. And, you know, I just prompted him a little bit. And he, you know, to see him come back and see the homebrews and what the guys had been doing, it was phenomenal, right? I mean, there's also, I want to explain something. So the American Dream competition went through. We had the person. Due to the problems that we received last year under, you know, what happened with the American, you know, just the competition we had with the homebrew, we are keeping that kind of quiet right now. Who won? That person kind of knows. They're going to, we will announce when we're ready with that because we want to make sure that if we're going after the IP or something is there, that that is captured. We don't want to lose it like we did last year. You know, we want to make sure that you're putting our money and our time into this. We want to make sure that everybody's excited. But think about it. You had Lynn from Massachusetts area with his augmented reality with Haunting Cruise. You had Taylor Gash with that three-level going-down-crazy stuff, right? And you had those two young men, which I have to say were amazing guys, with the Pokemon. All custom wire ramps that they did. They're young guys. I mean, they're like 20, 22, I think. They're very young. That was their first show. Don't forget Jason with the Dukes of Hazzard. Yes. People are like, well, that's a recent. Well, no, not really, because that game... The rules have changed. All rules have changed. The game is different. It's a multi-ball, too. I mean, think about it. He won the best of show, by the way. Yeah, best homebrew, yeah. And we can't forget about Elf, who was the second-place runner-up. I mean, that was an amazing game, too.
    153:57
    Okay, well, here's my suggestion there, then. Don't stick it all at the back of the hall, on the back wall. bring it out to the front, put it in the entrance have a big display there so people can see the future of pinball right there as they come in we could do that, we could actually maybe move it, you know the only reason we have it in the back of the hall because it's an attraction and everybody seems to wander back there and find it and I like it because it's right next to the American booth so I can go see and see what everybody is responding to absolutely, hey guys listen, market research is you know what do I see with people? I mean, listen, thank you, Rob Burke, first of all. Let's put that out there. Rob Burke, thank you very much for the Magic Girl, okay? This was a labor of love between Rob and I and you know, Rob and I meeting up in Erie, PA to get him the Magic Girl so that he could put it in his car and drive home almost an hour with the alarm going off because the back door was open. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to make sure Magic Girl got to, you know, to the guys over there, Eric and Max and the team, and, you know, to get that game fixed up, and not only that, bring it back to Expo. I mean, that game... Guys, think about that. So that game was sitting in Chicago. They drove from Chicago back to Buffalo. Then I met him in Buffalo, and he put it in my car. I took it from Buffalo to Ohio. Then I shipped it by air freight from Ohio to Amsterdam. Damn. Eric Bartles was the guy behind it. That's it. They came back to life. He had it for about three weeks, fixed it up, and then Max helped me put this whole thing together, and they shipped it back to the U.S., and then I brought it to Expo. So, wow. All for the Spirit of Expo. And let me say something. None of these costs, especially overnight shipping, were cheap. No. But you got the only working American Magic Girl in America now. At least for now. At least for now, yes. But you know what I want to mention, guys? In fact, Martin, you know this gentleman better than anyone else, but Neil McCrane? Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. So Neil does the UK show, or he's part of that UK show? Yeah, he runs the UK Open Tournament, yeah. so we're talking and I think what we're going to do is we're going to fly the winner of that event to Expo next year oh wow it'll be an attraction not only for him but for also us I'm always trying to think of new ideas and fun things to make the show exciting for everybody and I just hope your audience out there throughout Europe will consider coming to Expo because whether it be touring the factories I know Dave gave a lot of special VIP tours to people that came from overseas.
    156:58
    Or just meeting people that you've talked about or heard about or Facebooked with or whatever through social networking. You get a chance to meet these people. That is also a lot of fun. Absolutely. For me, it was kind of cool to see Gerard come from the Dutch Pinball Museum. Yeah. I think he had a blast too oh yeah absolutely everyone would connect and say oh I heard about you and next thing you know you're making international friends I know the guys from the Fargo Pinball Museum Bill Brooks and Emily Brooks they had met Gerard before and to hook up with him again it was like man buddy I miss you hey cuz I miss you everyone had a great time Okay, I'm aware we're a little short of time, so I just wanted to ask you this one question. You already mentioned one thing about the arrangement of the machines, but are there any changes to PeopleXO for next year that you can give us a little sneak preview of now?
    158:06
    Well, one of the things, I'll touch on this. Rob and I were talking about this, and maybe we could hear some feedback, because I did get some feedback, Rob, about non-carpeting in certain areas. But Rob and I talked about this, and we were thinking about this. What if we had the main aisle that went from the front of the booth, the front of the show, all the way to the back, and then the main aisle around those pods of nice games in front of Stern, and then going all the way back to the other corner, what if that was carpeted? You know, a nice carpeted area there. So you can be on concrete some of the times, but then if you want to just wander over and play games that are on carpeting, you can do that. It'll give a little bit of a break. That's one thing we were talking about, mixing up the EMs with the solid states. That's another thing we were talking about so that there's a draw all over the place.
    159:01
    The one thing I like about you, Dave, is when you said that American Pinball is a paper to carpeting, that was my favorite.
    159:10
    And on that note, guys, I gotta leave. I knew you were gonna do that. Dave, keep talking, guys. Thank you for... All right, Rob. We'll wrap it up, but thanks, buddy, for jumping on here and wanting to help. Thank you. Thank you, Robert, and thank you, David, for giving us all the info on this year's Pinball Expo, and congratulations once again on the great show. Not a problem. I actually can stay on for another five, ten minutes if you guys want to talk about something else. So, you know... We can talk about what's happening in American pinball, I suppose. Oh, we can talk about that. Sure. Yeah. Well, one of the things that we noticed while we were there. I thought we didn't get to see you at the factory tour when Max showed us around, but to pass our thanks on to Max for his time.
    159:56
    It seemed that you had quite a shortage of cabinets at that point. Is that an ongoing issue? Is it something which is no longer an issue? Is it something which other companies are experiencing too? Well, everybody's got a shortage of something. So, I mean, my biggest problem is cabinets and I'm still going through that and here's the thing I have it in like two divisions right I have the playfield line just keeps pumping out more and more playfields and we're putting them off to the side and then as soon as we have the cabinets we're shoving them in we're putting them into the cabinets going through the setups and testing them all out and burning them in and so forth but the cabinet has been an issue and it's still an issue for us listen, the cost of wood is up the cost of I guess this is kind of for us is that we have a standard on our cabinet which is, it's very well built most people who walk in and play an American game and they show up at my competitor's game and they go okay and then when you have a push on American they're like whoa, that's got some heft to it we like our cabinets and we haven't designed a certain way and it's just okay unfortunately we want to make sure we continue with that quality so right so you're you're limiting in who you can get to make them i suppose at the moment correct correct correct and the wood and uh in fact um the wood that we normally get our cabinets just recently is it was crazy um can't be received right now we can't get so we ended up I ended up signing off on going to a maple cabinet so right now we're paying for a little bit more on the wood but we have an actual nice maple cabinet that we're building together on that so that's pretty cool so we went the other way you know most manufacturers some people said well why don't we use this kind of material I was like no I don't want to use that material it's cheaper it's just right there I'll pay the few bucks more and get it in maple I mean it's kind of funny the manufacturers of the cabinets looked at us and were like you'll actually pay the extra bucks for the maple? I'm like yeah, because it's a better cabinet it's better wood at least until my other cabinet or my other source material can come back which most people it's pretty hard to tell the difference between the two materials Is the shortage of the previous material due to what's happening in Ukraine? Yes, it is. Right. Okay. It is definitely affected by the war in Ukraine.
    162:45
    So, but, you know, hey, we're dealing with the problems, right? I mean, I'm happy to say that, you know, we've had some circuits and chip problems. But, you know, we are backed by Ametron, and Ametron worked with us, and we solved a lot of the problems, and we have boards, we have everything moving in. I mean, you know, there's, unfortunately, manufacturing a pinball machine is not an easy thing. Manufacturing any arcade game is not an easy thing. I know a lot of people will say, oh, it's easy to do. Well, ask the homebrew guys, right? They'll tell you about the sweat and tears and the hours that they put in there. I mean, that's why I liked when I hired Ryan. Ryan knows what it takes and when now he's part of the game and the team he goes yeah this is this is not easy as as you know even the homebrew has got a little challenges here and there so you know it it works out there's a big difference between making a one-off game and then making something that's manufacturable isn't it absolutely I mean I have to say that I give my hats off to American Pinball the team that we have because you know listen they took the homebrew game Legends of Valhalla, they started two years ago in January, right? And in 10 months, they were able to take a homebrew to manufacturable, right, and then release it last year in October. And now it's one year since then, and we've been producing it, and now we have the classic model coming out in October, which we showed, and it was at Expo. A lot of people loved it. And they thought, well, this is a really nice thing. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles as the deluxe version, but it is still a great playing game for people. And people see where we're going with the company, and they're excited about it. We didn't see Scott or Frank at the show. Were they there? No, Frank had other obligations, and Scott was there the week prior. Scott is probably one of the world's best-ranked big buck hunters. and Scott Winston Chicago the week prior to that. So next year they definitely will be at Expo. I told them, I said, listen, guys, you're always welcome to Expo. You can come on down. We will make sure you guys are treated like rock stars. They are excited about where the game is going and so forth, and they're eagerly already working on something else. So we're kind of excited about that.
    165:18
    Fascinating facility you've got there. Thank you. Especially understanding that you're planning to open a third line. Yes. In such a small place, so to speak. Well, actually, if you saw where those boxes were, where we had those,
    165:39
    that's a perfect spot to throw in another line, you know, so we could actually have three lines running. And the idea of Jonathan, I understand that three lines is kind of like, Am I going to have three lines manufacturing all the time? Maybe. But the idea of that is to the point that I can set up a line. Let's say I set up line one as Oktoberfest and line two as Legends of Valhalla, right? And Oktoberfest is getting close to the end. I can take line three and set up as Hot Wheels. Then, which that means is that all week long or how long it takes to set up that, I have the team set up the line from the stock room and the purchasing and that department so that when the last Oktoberfest comes off the line, all the workers just go from that line right over to the Hot Wheels and just start manufacturing that.
    166:34
    And then we can tear down Oktoberfest, put whatever the next line is up for that, and then say Legends of Mahala is near a lull, we can take them and put them on line three and then have line two break down. And then, you know, we can play back and forth. And the idea is, you know, the orders have been coming in unbelievable. And, you know, I have one thing I want to tell you guys. I have many other podcasters say nobody wants Houdini, nobody wants Octoberfest, nobody wants Hot Wheels, nobody wants LLV.
    167:10
    I'm backordered on all four lines. Okay, all four titles are on back order in significant amounts. So I'm just supplying all my customers with their games. They may say that nobody wants them. Well, maybe they're the only ones that don't know anybody that wants them, but there are people definitely in line that are wanting games. You saw that one big, in the factory, you saw all those games in the back, all 33 of them. They all went into a container and got all shipped over to Australia. So they're on their way to our customers in Australia right now. It's true to say that you can't make them fast enough. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there you have it. Rob Burke and David Ficks from the Pinball Expo team commenting on the just recent Pinball Expo. and I guess that rounds it up for this episode Indeed, as you can hear, it's been a very busy time and we hope you've enjoyed our look back on all the events from October 2022 in Pinball World We will of course be back at the end of November, the start of December, looking back at November and all the excitement that took place there, but until then from me, Martinao I wish you a very good Pimble One. And from me, Jonathan Houston from Pimble Magazine as well.
    168:42
    And we hope to be back, like Marten said, early next month. Okay, until then, from both of us, goodbye. Bye.
    168:51
    Oh, right, I forgot to go. Oh, Gary, no. Yeah, I gotta go. Oh, well. Next time. Next time, next time. Bye.
    169:05
    Thank you.