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Pat Lawlor Part 2 – Williams Wreck'n Ball

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·1h 44m·held·Apr 1, 2021
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Pat Lawlor early Williams career: from Wrecking Ball whitewood to Banzai Run troubled reception.

Summary

Silverball Chronicles 2 covers Pat Lawlor early Williams career, focusing on the development of Wrecking Ball (which became Banzai Run in 1988). Hosts David Dennis and Ron Hallett discuss how Lawler transitioned from the video game industry collapse of 1984, met Larry DeMar at Brunswick bowling tech, built a whitewood prototype, and eventually joined Williams as a contract designer. The episode explores the competitive shark-tank culture at Williams, Lawler's learning curve on machine design details, and the internal skepticism surrounding Banzai Run despite its strong test location performance.

Key Claims

  • Motordome (1986) was the first pinball machine with a difficulty setting (novice/expert/normal) selectable before ball 1, not Whodunit

    high confidence · Correction from listener William B., confirmed against IPDB documentation and Todd Tuckey interview; Ron confirms from Pinberg tournament experience

  • Larry DeMar had a reputation for coming up with ideas that made money and could 'double dip' — work for Williams while freelancing designs back to the company — as long as his concepts were profitable

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor quoted: Ken Fedesna knew what they were doing; Larry had reputation for selling ideas like Robotron back to Williams

  • Pat Lawlor and Larry DeMar built a Wrecking Ball whitewood by stripping down a Road Kings machine and presenting it to Williams for sale

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor interview quoted in episode; whitewood visible on IPDB with photos; original demo video available on Duncan F. Brown YouTube channel

  • Wrecking Ball was copyrighted in 1987 by Cyber Kids Limited, a tie-in with Larry DeMar

    medium confidence · David Dennis states this while discussing IPDB documentation; assumes connection to DeMar

  • Banzai Run was internally considered a joke and novelty machine at Williams; many thought it would be an albatross and questioned why leadership wasted money

    high confidence · David Dennis summarizes internal Williams sentiment; Pat Lawlor quoted on competitive shark-tank culture and feeling like 'the toxic new guy'

  • Banzai Run prototype tested at 50 cents per play made more money than other games on location, but not enough more to justify the concept to Williams leadership

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor quoted; production run of only 1,751 units suggests poor market performance

  • Pat Lawlor made early design mistakes on Banzai Run, including lack of adjustment for outlay posts

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor quoted; Larry DeMar credited with teaching Lawler that work and talent lead to mastery of pinball design

Notable Quotes

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

    Pat Lawlor @ ~24:00 — Describes the casual genesis of Wrecking Ball concept that would become Banzai Run; shows how Lawler's pitch to DeMar led to whitewood prototype

  • “Ken Fedesna knew what we were doing. Larry had a reputation that he could come up with ideas that made money.”

    Pat Lawlor @ ~27:00 — Explains how Larry DeMar's track record allowed him to operate outside normal corporate constraints, a key dynamic in early Williams culture

  • “The way things worked at Williams were if you were a powerful game designer, you could do anything. Steve Ritchie could convince them to do anything. I couldn't do that yet.”

    Pat Lawlor @ ~35:00 — Reveals hierarchical nature of designer power at Williams; Ritchie's leverage vs. Lawler's neophyte status

  • “I wasn't smart enough to know what was going on. I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I wasn't going to waste it.”

    Pat Lawlor @ ~50:00 — Shows Lawler's resilient attitude despite hostile reception from competitors like Python Anghelo; frames Williams pressure as motivational

  • “If you put in the work and you are talented, you will learn how to do pinball.”

    Larry DeMar @ ~47:00 — Summarizes DeMar's philosophy of designer development; indicates mentorship culture amid competitive environment

  • “Lawler didn't have anything to mix and create unless Eugene and I were there.”

    Python Anghelo @ ~48:30 — Reveals contempt from established Williams team toward new hire Lawler; shows tribal territoriality and skepticism of outsiders

  • “Stay away from the toxic new guy. He'll be gone soon. You don't want to get caught up in his crash and burn.”

    Pat Lawlor @ ~49:00 — Captures the toxic gossip and dismissal Lawler faced; illustrates social isolation despite geographic proximity to Larry DeMar

Entities

Pat LawlorpersonDavid DennispersonRon HallettpersonLarry DeMarpersonGeorge GomezpersonSteve RitchiepersonPython Angheloperson

Signals

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pat Lawler discusses learning the finer details of pinball design, including understanding how shots feel and flow (kinetics). Good designers instinctively know when mechanics are 'clunky' vs. smooth, and can adjust micro-details like ramp placement to achieve the right feel.

    high · Pat Lawler quoted: 'designers can really figure out why things feel clunky... if I move this to the left it'll be clunky if I move it to the right by you know five centimeters it will be smooth and the kinetics will play right.'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Wrecking Ball was an innovative design featuring a vertical playfield in the backbox, a novel concept that foreshadowed future mechanical innovations like those in Banzai Run.

    high · Pat Lawler: 'I have an idea for a pinball machine with a vertical play field in the back glass'; David Dennis notes the design shows where Banzai Run concept originated

  • ?

    design_innovation: Banzai Run was likely among the first Williams games to experiment with Diamond Plate, a clear protective coating process that became more common in later designs.

    medium · David Dennis: 'I think it was the first one... most of the games they experimented with were Pat Waller games because he was behind that technology'

  • ?

    industry_signal: Williams operated with a highly competitive internal culture often described as a shark tank or shark pool. Teams were territorial, competitive rules were unwritten, and newcomers faced social isolation and skepticism from established designer cliques. Python Anghelo and others dismissed Pat Lawler as 'the toxic new guy' who would 'crash and burn.'

    high · George Gomez on shark pools; Pat Lawler: 'stay away from the toxic new guy... you don't want to get caught up in his crash and burn'; Python Anghelo dismissal quoted

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.315

0:00
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy goal to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today.
0:27
The Pinball Network is online. launching silver ball chronicles that's just so good we're so good even barry osler thinks so
1:00
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me, Ron Hallett. What's up fella? Good morning. We are back on your pinball airwaves here in the pinball network. As always, Ron, we are glad to have everybody join us. You sound like you haven't had your coffee yet. I am working on my coffee. It's right here. So the energy level will increase as the podcast goes on. It will. And then towards the end, it'll just taper off into complete nonsense and sadness until I get another coffee. Okay. That's how it works here, folks, on Silver Ball Chronicles. This is what we do to keep you energized and excited.
1:55
So what have you been doing? Not much, really. Not since the last week. We recorded recently. This is the shortest period between recordings, I think. It is. I had a bit of an issue recording last time, so I was actually a week late. Well, you didn't have an issue recording. You had an issue editing. That's right. So the editing didn't go well. The cloud, as it were, let me down. but that's just how it goes. Sometimes you sort of live and learn, but I was still able to get it out and entertain folks. Of course, I'm talking about the first in our series of Pinball is Dying, and that was Williams from the early 1980s. What did you think? Did you think it came together well, that episode? Yeah, Barry Ousler thinks so. Yes, so Barry Ousler himself, the man, or at least a person who looks like him and has a profile on Facebook, mentioned that he thought the episode was great on our Facebook page. So, of course, swing on over to facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. You'll be able to engage with us there, and we often put up our shenanigans there. So I'm sure Barry is eagerly awaiting part two. So that's what we're going to give him, right? Oh, no. What? No, that's not how it works here. Oh. So what we do is we give you a little bit of something. We give you just a taste, and then we just take it away. So this episode, we're going to go with a completely different topic, but we are going to give the people what they want, and that's an episode about the Addams Family. Oh, wonderful. So remember, if you wanted to go back and listen to any of our other podcasts, you can do that at silverballchronicles.com, or you can search for us in your podcatcher under Silverball Chronicles, And, of course, we premiere every month on the wonderful Pinball Network, so you can see us there. And we have our own feed. Yes, so if you don't want some of the other pinball content on the Pinball Network, which I don't know why you'd want to do that. I don't know why either, no. There is some premier content there. Everything except for Joel Engelberth is fantastic on the Pinball Network. Wow. Of course, you can leave us and any of the Pinball Network podcasts or streamers a five-star review over on the This Week in Pinball promoters database. Swing on over to This Week in Pinball and check out some of the exciting streams and leave a review. Is that the only type of review you're allowed to do is a five-star? That's it. If you leave less than a five-star. Don't bother. I am going to hunt you down. Okay. As soon as this border to the U.S. opens. Oh, that's right. You can't even come here. Fail. No, no. We don't want to mix with you folk at the moment. And if people are listening to this 10 years down the road, there's nothing going on that's that important. Nope. T-shirts, of course. We sold a T-shirt last month. We did? One T-shirt. It went all the way to New Zealand. Woo-hoo! I don't know if you know this or not, Ron, but we're a big deal in New Zealand. I'm sure we are. Probably New Zealand, Australia. Are they close? How close are they? I never looked at a map. Some would say that they are a hobbit's throw away from each other. I don't get it. Stone's throw. Oh, okay. Of course, we don't make much off of that swag. It just feeds our egos that somebody somewhere is wearing a T-shirt with probably my name on it, and that makes me feel like I'm completely validated and I'm important to the world, much like winning an award does. What do you mean? I'm looking at our account, at least $1.10 deposited. I mean, we are killing it. That's right. You can go to that ice cream shop that just opened up because it's springtime. That's true. But you still have to kick in a little bit of the extra Slam Tilt money.

Banzai Run was likely one of the first games, if not the first, to experiment with Diamond Plate clear coating

medium confidence · David Dennis states he thinks Pat Lawlor games led Diamond Plate experiments; invites correction from listeners

Ken Fedesna
person
Paul DeSaltperson
Ed Boonperson
Mark Sprengerperson
Brian Schmidtperson
Duncan F. Brownperson
Steve Kordekperson
Williamscompany
Stern Pinballcompany
Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
Dave Nutting & Associatescompany
Brunswickcompany
Cyber Kids Limitedcompany
Banzai Rungame
Wrecking Ball (whitewood)game
Road Kingsgame
  • ?

    personnel_signal: Larry DeMar operated as an informal mentor to Pat Lawler, providing feedback on design details and instilling confidence that work and talent lead to mastery. Despite the toxic competitive environment, DeMar gave Lawler direct support and tutelage.

    high · Pat Lawler: 'Larry would come out and give me feedback... I changed them, and then he'd come out and try it again'; Larry DeMar philosophy: 'if you put in the work and you are talented, you will learn how to do pinball'

  • ?

    business_signal: At Williams in the mid-to-late 1980s, game designers were employees with negotiable contracts that included extended benefits, performance bonuses, and sales participation. Powerful designers like Steve Ritchie could negotiate favorable terms; newcomers like Lawler had less leverage.

    high · Pat Lawler: 'the game designers were employees with contracts, employees with extended benefits... the designers were put in the driver's seat when it came to the contracts'

  • $

    market_signal: Banzai Run was tested at 50 cents per play and generated strong location revenue compared to other games, but Williams determined the incremental profit margin was insufficient to justify production investment. Only 1,751 units were produced.

    high · David Dennis: 'The prototype was out on test at 50 cents a play and it made even more money than all of the other games on location but it didn't make enough more as far as Williams was concerned'

  • ?

    product_concern: Pat Lawler made design mistakes on Banzai Run as a first-time Williams designer, including failing to incorporate adjustment capability for outlay posts. This reflects the learning curve expected of new designers in the era.

    high · David Dennis: 'One of his newbie mistakes on Banzai Run, is there's no adjustment for the outlay posts, so they are where they are'; attributed to Lawler's inexperience vs. design veterans

  • ?

    historical_signal: The 1984 video game industry collapse created a talent pipeline into pinball. Pat Lawler, George Gomez, and others from video game companies (Dave Nutting & Associates) transitioned to pinball when their prior employer closed, creating opportunities in a stabilizing pinball market.

    high · David Dennis: 'money was thrown at the video game industry... Then it went to nothing. Overnight, it was all gone'; George Gomez: this is 'how Pat ended up working at Williams, sort of, in a roundabout way, because Pat was working at Dave Nutting when they closed doors'

  • ?

    community_signal: Correction from listener William B. about Motor Dome (1986) being the first machine with difficulty settings, not Whodunit. Ron confirmed via Pinberg tournament experience. Reflects engaged community knowledge-sharing and fact-checking.

    high · William B. email with IPDB documentation; Ron's Pinberg experience confirms Motor Dome's difficulty mechanics

  • ?

    content_signal: Duncan F. Brown's YouTube channel hosts archival Williams company videos, including a ~1-hour demo video of the original Wrecking Ball prototype with Williams executives in suits. This represents rare primary-source documentation of early 1980s pinball development.

    high · David Dennis recommends Duncan F. Brown YouTube channel (D-U-N-C-A-N-F-B-R-O-W-N); notes hour-long Wrecking Ball demo with 'Williams people in suits' available online

  • ?

    collector_signal: Original Wrecking Ball whitewood prototype is documented on IPDB with photos; represents a piece of pinball history accessible to community. Pat Lawler maintains various machines from his early career in a barn facility near Chicago, though some deteriorated from storage conditions.

    high · David Dennis: 'swing on over to IPDB, you can look up Wrecking Ball'; notes machines stored in barn 'didn't survive too well'; whitewood is 'all wood, right? It doesn't have any art on it'

    • 5:49
    Yes. By the way, that's my podcast. Yes, the Slam Tilt podcast with Bruce, what's his name? With Bruce Nightingale, Ron Hallett. I should wait until the end of the show to mention that. Plug, plug, plug. So we do have a correction. from our last episode. And this correction is not from Mr. Nightingale. Ah, okay. So you know that it's actually a good one. So this comes from William B. He sent an email into silverballchronicles at gmail.com. That's where we go through a lot of our corrections and a few other things. He also included an image. He says the first pinball machine to allow a difficulty setting. Now, we had mentioned, of course, that it was whodunit. Yes, we mentioned in whodunit in the Dwight Sullivan episode that that had a difficulty setting. William says, the first pinball machine to allow a difficulty setting, which is novice, expert, or normal, can be selected before ball one was actually Bally's Motor Dome in 1986. The classic Bally Motor Dome. I learned a lot from an interview with Todd Tuckey and can confirm the documentation on the internet pinball database, the motor dome skill chart attached, that the player can select level one, two, or three with the flippers with the corresponding easy, medium, or hard. Sullivan may have patented the novice mode, but it still isn't the first time the player control difficulty setting was used. Love the pod, Will. Thank you so much for that i can confirm because uh at pinberg every year that was one of the games that you had to know to choose level three at the beginning of the game or you were going to lose really so you couldn't sneak that in you couldn't sneak it in it right at the beginning of the ball you have to pick one two or three and you want three because the scoring is higher so if you don't pick three you're gonna lose see somebody like me would be would be dumb and and me if i didn't know that if you're just standing there like what am i supposed to pick yep i don't think it even says in the game easy medium or hard it just says level one level two and level three which isn't very helpful we also have from our last episode our williams in the early 80s slash barry oustler some feedback from beau jimmy beau jimmy says hi guys as usual only praise for me i just want to mention though that in regards to pharaoh's back glass there's also an homage to a certain man with a large mustache on the lower right. Yeah, so I did actually look that up. I confirmed. I looked up the back glass on Pharaoh, which we said looks like it's got hidden lady parts in it. And down in the bottom corner, there is a small image of Mr. Roger Sharp. Or maybe it's Burt Reynolds. Or someone with another mustache. But one would assume that it's probably the man that saved Pinball. Is it just the assumption? If there's a guy with a mustache, it has to be Roger Sharp. Exactly. If it's not him, it's probably Ken Fedesna. So maybe we can get a correction to the correction. Someone's saying that's not Roger Sharp. That's someone else. So there you go. But that's pretty cool. That's I didn't even didn't even notice that. And I spend a lot of time looking at that back glass. We have some feedback from MTM who says, I'm only 20 minutes in and eagerly awaiting my travel to and from work tomorrow so I can continue listening. However, the mention of a hidden back glass art made me think of Pharaoh. So there you go. somebody that knows how to use a pause button if they can't take the whole two hours in one go. He's not going to let that go. The most recent years of Pat Lawler's career was covered in our episode 10, Pat Lawler, Pinball's Roller Coaster Tycoon. You can see that in our archives. Now, we spoke about his shift from Williams to Stern and finally, Jersey Jack Pinball. Pat has a demeanor which, of course, over the years has rubbed some people the wrong way. You need to get strong personalities in line. You need to meet corporate deadlines. You need to push your creative vision to the edge and have the confidence in yourself and your team that the product that you're designing will not only be fun, but it will sell well and make money. Maybe part of that reputation was created in his early years at Williams. Pat began his career at Williams being tossed into a highly competitive shark tank, dodging bullets, avoiding naysayers, all while quickly designing in rapid succession some of the highest selling, most innovative, and most fun pinball machines of all time. Machines that still stand the test of time. Thanks for joining us this month to cover Pat Lawler, the one with Adam's family. I still like Williams Wrecking Ball. Okay. Thank you for joining us this month for Pat Lawler, the Williams Wrecking Ball.
    10:46
    And also the one with Adam's family in it. I like that, yeah. So as a quick recap to our last episode, Ron, you know, Pat had bumped around from job to job in the early 80s. He went to university, did some degrees. He was out in the workforce being a manager at a car repair facility. He just wasn't excited to be in those industries. And Pat Lawler seems like the kind of guy that needs to be emotionally invested in what he's doing to make sure that you get 100% of what he can provide. So, you know, going back to our previous episode on Pat Lawler where we covered sort of his stern and Jersey Jack ears, do you have any thoughts that you wanted to sort of toss in this episode now that we're actually going back in time? Not really. I'm just going to let it play out. Yeah, so we're doing this one a little bit different. Usually we go sort of chronologically through time. This one we started at current time, and now we're kind of going back into the beginning of his career. I thought it would be fun to mix it up that way because you don't want to go with all the high notes all the time except for dialed in, which is still awesome. I don't care what anybody says. So Pat ended up at a company called Dave Nutting & Associates for a time. It was a video game manufacturer who worked closely with Midway in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is actually where Pat had met George Gomez, who's currently an executive vice president and chief creative officer at Stern Pinball.
    12:18
    So what was so important around this sort of 1984 time period? Well, Pat said money was thrown at the video game industry. It was so big and massive, there was more money around than you could imagine. Then it went to nothing. Overnight, it was all gone. Yeah, so picking up from our last episode with Williams in the early 80s, this is sort of around that same time period where everything is coming to a crashing halt. All the money is starting to dry up, even in video games in 1984.
    12:50
    Sometimes, though, and this is very philosophical for everybody out there, so pick yourselves up, folks, and feel good, that sometimes when the worst things happen, when the industry is crashing around us, we're all losing jobs and things are bad, this creates opportunities. And at the time, it's probably very difficult to see those opportunities. But this is a prime example of that. George Gomez says, incidentally, this is how Pat ended up working at Williams, sort of, in a roundabout way, because Pat was working at Dave Nutting when they closed doors, So he had to go to find work and in a roundabout way, hooked up with Larry DeMar. Yes. So we hear Larry DeMar's name all the time. He just he just continues to pop up in this era, not just with his programming and not just with his code and designs and boards and all of those stuff at Williams. For some reason, Larry DeMar always ends up popping up. And this is even outside of kind of his day job. So Pat went to work for a company that transferred arcade and video games into cartridges, which at the time was, if you think about sort of your early Nintendo cartridges or Atari cartridges, that was sort of a novelty at the time. That was a new technology. After less than a year of that, of course, business had collapsed. And then he ended up working at a bowling tech company, developing bowling alley systems for a company called Brunswick. This is where he met Paul DeSalt, who is, of course, that lead programmer at the time at Williams who's doing basically all of the programming. And Paul knew Larry DeMar. So this is how we're drawing all of these lines in the industry. The pinball industry, Ron, as you know, everybody kind of knows everybody. They know what they're doing. They know where they are. And people come in and out of the picture all the time. Isn't that right? They all know each other. That is definitely true. So one day, Larry DeMar came to see some of that bowling tech. My assumption is that because Williams was doing those bowlers, those bowling lane type of games, he was probably interested in some of the bowling tech that actual bowling lanes were using. Or maybe just puck bowlers, something like that. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, maybe he was just bored and needed to fill his day. And he just sort of was like, I'm going to go over to Brunswick and see how the boys are doing over there. When Larry DeMar was over at Brunswick, he bumped into Pat Lawler. And Pat Lawler would say, wow, I mean, we'd go out for lunch and I'd play high speed in a bar. I mean, my whole world was high speed. And Larry DeMar was a big part of that. Now, of course, Pat had never really met Larry DeMar. And he would know the name Larry DeMar, but he wouldn't know the face. So that's when Pat said, I told him, hey, I have an idea for a pinball machine with a vertical play field in the back glass. and then larry basically said yeah let's go build this so larry went to a distributor and he bought a new in box road kings and they completely stripped it oh no i like oh that was such a good game oh i like road kings they built a complete working model and we're going to show it to williams and try to sell it to him so they were going to build a a whitewood a new machine well wait wait a second here now larry demar who more or less works at williams goes out and finds Pat Lawler, who just one day randomly says, hey, you're one of my favorite pinball people. Let's build a pinball machine. Larry goes, okay, sure, let's build a pinball machine. So they buy a Williams pinball machine. They tear it apart and build a Whitewood, and they want to sell it to Williams? Yeah, they bought the Road Kings. He just didn't grab it. So is Larry double dipping? No. So is he working for Williams, collecting a paycheck, and then on the side building whitewoods and selling them back all right well according to pat waller what pat says ken fedez knew what we were doing larry had a reputation that he could come up with ideas that made money like vid kids remember that from our one of our previous episodes he'd come up with something and he'd sell it back to williams like he did with robotron all those type of games he was one of the only guys that could get away with that so he he he It was double dipping, but just as long as his ideas made money. If his ideas made money for Williams, they didn't care. It's right in Robotron, too. It'll say, like, designed by vidkids. So one thing that I found kind of interesting through all this research at the time is Pat Lawler actually has a shop in his house. Oh, legendary shop. So much has happened in that shop. Yeah, this isn't just a shop. Like, it's funny because I just said shop, and you're like, oh, it's the legendary shop. And this is where he did a lot of work for Dialed In. of course Willy Wonka and whatever he's working on right now he does all of that work and fabrication in his shop at his home which I think is like an hour from Chicago or something it's not close it's quite the facility I've been told like a proper work facility and he has all of his games that he's made in there as well well he has a shop and he has a barn but he put a lot of the games that he worked on new and box in the barn and they didn't survive too well a lot of them No. Pat says, I built everything. Larry would come out and give me feedback like the jet bumper isn't in the right place. I changed them, and then he'd come out and try it again and then program it. It was called Wrecking Ball. We got it to the point where it would work, and it was playable. So this is the game with a vertical play field in the back box, which sounds a lot like Banzai Run, but we'll talk about that in a minute. So if you swing on over to IPDB, you can look up Wrecking Ball, And it's Reckon with an apostrophe N, not I-N-G. And you can look at all of the photos of that original Whitewood. And it's pretty interesting because it does, you can see where Bonsai Run had come from. Very, very cool machine. It's all wood, right? It doesn't have any art on it. It's very straightforward. But it is very cool looking at some of these pictures because it's a piece of history, right? And if pictures are not good enough for you, you can actually see this thing in action. And I'm going to make a recommendation here as the history podcast we are. If you go to YouTube and you look up the following channel, it's called Duncan F. Brown. So D-U-N-C-A-N-F-B-R-O-W-N. It's Duncan Brown. He was a former Williams employee. I think he eventually ended up working at Larry DeMar's company when Williams got out of pinball, and he currently works at Jersey Jack. But he's also somewhat of a pinball historian, and he's collected as many historical pinball items as he could. He's built a Harry Williams game from documentation, a game that was never actually manufactured, and he made it and brought it to Pinball Expo one year. But he has tons of videos, and a lot of them are from within the company. And there is actually the Wrecking Ball original demo, the one where all the Williams people in suits are standing around it, looking at it. And the Williams office is online. You can actually watch it. It's like an hour long. That's so cool. That's neat. And I think the best part about those old videos and we'll and as we move into more of that sort of late 80s into the 90s, video becomes a lot easier to find. Right. Because people had camcorders. Yeah. Don't expect this to be high def or anything. And a lot of it is taken from behind the people looking at the game. But you get the there wasn't exactly any cinematography. No, it actually looks like they just had a I'm guessing they probably put it on a tripod. and they just pointed it at the game. But unfortunately, I'm looking at the video. Most of the time, people are standing in front of the game. And the interesting thing to me is the computer that's in the shot, like a computer from 1986, 87 was quite the thing. I'm just looking at this monochrome monitor. Sorry, I digress. But I mean, the coolest part about those old videos are that you can see people in a very sort of casual setting. and now we're looking way back, like 30 years or more in some cases, and you can sort of see these people. So this game was actually copyrighted in 1987 by Cyber Kids Limited, which of course must be a tie-in with Larry DeMar. Wrecking Ball is kind of neat. It's like a construction-themed game. It has all of those little bits and pieces in there. One day, Ken Fidesna and Steve Ritchie came out to see what they had made. They played, and they sat around and had a drink, and Larry went into negotiations with them about building a real game at Williams. Four to six months later, they agreed on terms. Pat went to work for Williams on a contract to build Wrecking Ball. They actually gave him an office across from Larry DeMar. So that's pretty cool. So nowadays you just get a cube, I guess. It depends. So employment at Williams. Now, this is something we haven't so much talked about now in our previous episodes. And I just wanted to sort of talk about how these, what I can garner a lot of these contracts would look like or a lot of the, you know, the employment standards that you would have at the time. This was a big deal, especially back then, because pinball had gone through these ebbs and flows, these peaks and valleys. And certain individuals, Steve Ritchie, for example, would have pretty amazing contracts. Well, Pat says, at this time, the game designers were employees with contracts, employees with extended benefits. It was a great thing. You negotiated the contracts. The benefits were much bigger because you negotiated. Yeah, so the designers were put in the driver's seat when it came to the contracts. So they were the ones that sort of had the special sauce. You know, getting a part of the sales or getting better performance bonuses were something that you could negotiate. As I mentioned before, you know, could you imagine Steve Ritchie's contract at the time? Like, this guy just shows up and just destroys sales numbers. This is probably how he afforded a Porsche back in the day. Well, Pat says, the way things worked at Williams were if you were a powerful game designer, you could do anything. Steve Ritchie could convince them to do anything. I couldn't do that yet. So Pat Lawler, of course, coming in on the ground floor as a contract employee, he's probably got a couple of benefits. But Wrecking Ball would eventually become Banzai Run. Now, I have not played a Banzai Run. I've seen lots of Banzai Runs. I've had a friend of mine actually owned a Banzai Run. I just didn't end up ever playing it. It is mechanically impressive. It is a sports motocross theme. It's from May of 1988, so we're in the late 80s now. Things have sort of started to recover. They're back on the upswing. It is a Williams System 11B. It sells 1,751 units. It's designed by Pat Lawler and Larry DeMar. The art is done by Mark Springer and sound and music by Brian Schmidt. Software, Larry DeMar and Ed Boon did some polish on that. And it was also, I think, one of the first games, if not the first game, with Diamond Plate, the clear coating process, when they were starting to experiment. So there are Diamond Plate bonsai runs out there. Great. Let's start a whole podcast here with Ron and Dave talking about clear coat, because there's not enough podcasts in the pinball industry that talk about clear coat. Oh, it's part of history. I think it was the first one. Someone can correct me on that, but I think most of the games they experimented with were Pat Waller games because he was behind that technology. The theme of Wrecking Ball was not really that great. Like, construction-y theme. Like, nothing says exciting like construction. Roadshow. Oops. Pat would say, we were fishing around for a theme. One day, Mark Springer did a bunch of drafts and said, you should do a motorcycle game. Couldn't come up with anything better, so it became Bonsai Run. Almost makes sense since they ripped off of Road Kings to do it. Yeah, poor Road Kings. I like Road Kings. pat would say that he needed to put in time to learn the finer details of design so in the interview one of the interviews and it's in the show notes of course is an old interview from top cast and he talks a little bit about his philosophies pat lawler can speak sort of on a long drawn out roger sharp-esque essay when he speaks but when he does speak much like roger sharp you're like you're captivated by what he's talking about and when he's talking about the finer details of design designers can really figure out why things feel clunky and why you know why shots make you go like yeah so do you want to kind of describe what clunky might be clunky is you know you shoot a ramp it's not smooth you shoot a shot that's not smooth maybe just constantly rattles in and out rejects the shots just don and it not necessarily flow A game could not have flow and also not be clunky I think I always think of clunky as more as just shots just rattle in and out and nothing feels good to shoot on the game. When you make a shot, you just go like, yeah, that feels good. Like something inside of you feels the way the ball moves. And, you know, Steve Ritchie would sort of call that kinetics.
    26:37
    How does the ball feel? really good designers instinctively know how things just end up being clunky so if i made a white wood i could make a shot and it was just the ball would just rattle around or it would go through and just not be that satisfying to use a cliche instinctively pinball designers that are very very good you know i'd say keith elwyn for example they just sort of know okay if i put it if i move this to the left it'll be clunky if i move it to the right by you know five centimeters it will be smooth and the kinetics will play right. Very, very cool. But you don't just know that right out of the gate. So somebody like Pat Lawler had to sort of learn a little bit of those finer details. And the other thing he learned, and he said this was one of his newbie mistakes on Banzai Run, is there's no adjustment for the outlay posts, so they are where they are. Pat gave a lot of credit to Larry DeMar, who he said was good at instilling in people, if you put in the work and you are talented, you will learn how to do pinball. That's awesome. Good for you, Larry DeMar. When's our Larry DeMar episode? I don't think he deserves one. It looks like this point it would be like four hours long. Nobody would listen to a podcast for four hours. Well, the basic feeling internally at Williams was that Banzai Run was a joke, a novelty pinball machine. Many thought the thing was going to be an albatross, and why did leadership waste the money? Yeah, that's kind of a bummer, right, that you come in to Williams, you're excited to do your first game, and everybody's like, oh, there's this new guy over there doing this, you know, novelty game. Like, why don't they just, why don't they just build the game with the monster truck under the glass that drives over cars for tickets? Like, that's a bummer, man. Now, at this time, Williams was very much well known as a bit of a shark tank. That people were incredibly competitive, incredibly competitive at Williams. And they had all these different teams. In fact, some people would call them almost like street gangs. So Pat's feeling was that people thought, stay away from the toxic new guy. He'll be gone soon. You don't want to get caught up in his crash and burn.
    28:46
    Wow, that feels horrible. This is what George Gomez says about shark tanks. Well, he calls them shark pools. That if he had not spent time in the Marvin Glass shark tank, he said, it's a different kind of shark, but it's a shark nonetheless. less that nobody gives a shit about you you know you're in the shark pool there's some big honking great white sharks so man there's a lot of sharks going on at williams george said a lot of positive things about those teams in a lot of his interviews and quotes back in the day but one thing was for sure he made sure that everybody knew that it was highly competitive and there were small wars that would happen between these teams wars over max you can't use my mac or you can't use it until my game is done or whatever they had like non-written rules and stuff it was yeah as the new guy you got to learn those rules and each team would go into their foxhole you know they would work in their teams they would build their machines and um you know may the best team win really now for example we had brought this up in a previous episode where python angelo was certainly one of the instigators and one of those commanders within the battlefield wasn't he I know he didn't like Pat Lawler. Yeah, he didn't like him at all. So Python says, Lawler didn't have anything to mix and create unless Eugene and I were there. Yeah, Pat would say, I wasn't smart enough to know what was going on. I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I wasn't going to waste it. That's an awesome attitude for Pat Lawler to have. You know, you kind of go in, you're not really sure what's going on, but you know what? But Williams, the pinball manufacturer, in my opinion, is giving you an opportunity to build a machine, and you're not going to waste it. That is some great life advice from Pat Lawler there. Yeah, kind of like the Steve Ritchie episode when Steve Kordek told Stevie he didn't like the flash design, and Steve just thought and said, screw it, I ain't changing it. I like it.
    30:47
    Pat really worked his ass off to launch the best machine. and of course it was based on the original specs and design of wrecking ball but of course that would change over time pinball wanted to find ways to get more money from the player pinball had been five cents 10 cents 25 cents now we're really moving into that we're trying to get two quarters the prototype was out on test at 50 cents a play and it made even more money than all of the other games on location but it didn't make enough more as far as williams was concerned did the bonsai run concept fail well being they didn't do it again and they only made 1750 units the description of bonsai runs so it's it's a standard play field you know cabinet on the bottom right you've got your regular play field on the bottom it's got pop bumpers and a spinner it's got a ramp It looks like a regular pinball machine, but the back box is like another half play field, and it's sort of vertical, right? And you're shooting up with the flippers on the bottom. Yeah, it's not sort of vertical. It is vertical. It's really unusual, right? Like, if you had this in a lineup of pins, it's something that's going to catch your imagination. It is super cool to play. I'll say that. It's got three flippers in the back box. So it's got two on the bottom, and then it's got kind of like one up on the top corner, and it's got a couple of kickers that kick it up the play field. Yep, you go up the play field. So kind of the idea is you're on a motocross bike, and you make it into the back box. Now, one bit that's super, super cool is the ball that's on the upper back box play field is the same ball that you're using on the bottom play field. Oh, yeah. It carries it up there. So it's not like there's a ball kind of in there and it just sort of pops out of a hidden place. It is the actual ball, which is super cool. It's an unusual game. I mean, it's going to draw you in. It's going to make you want to put money in it, right? It has an extremely hard-to-get jackpot. Because if I'm remembering, you have to start multi-ball, you have to lock a ball in the lower play field, get to the upper play field, and then go all the way up to the final shot to get the jackpot. Williams, we're changing the way the world looks at pinball. This one's even better. Here, check this one out. Introducing Banzai Run, the pinball machine with one continuous play field on two different planes.
    33:16
    Wow. You've never seen anything like this. Yeah, it's because it's crazy. Williams Pinball, number one on any plane. Wow. Yeah, they went all in on this one. So 1,700 units, it doesn't sell very well. This machine, it goes for a lot of money on the secondary. Oh, yeah. Especially if you have one of those diamond plate versions I spoke of earlier. Oh, God help you. Is it pinball? Oh, it's definitely pinball. It's definitely pinball? Now, it's got a lot of those sort of Pat Lawler staples, right? It's got that physical kickback on the left side. So the ball goes down the left side. It's got a physical kickback. Yeah, the flippers, both flippers are offset to the right with the larger left side. Just a lot of the staples are already coming into place. Yeah, and it's so funny because it's such an early part of his career. It's such an early part of his design. He's just designing that, creating that sort of philosophy, which is very, very cool. So after selling 1,750 units, Ken Fedesna went to Pat and said, You did a fine job of taking a project we didn't know you could do. We'd like to have you stay. So they agreed on a new contract for a few years, and Pat went off to work on his next pinball machine, and he dreamed up his own design. So he didn't have any input from Larry DeMar or anything like that. He says he's going to go and build a traditional pinball machine. So Pat had a really strange idea for this next machine, didn't he? I don't know if it's strange, but I think Pat likes natural disasters. He likes those old disaster movies from the 1960s. Or 70s, whether the ones in Sense Around or whatever it was called. Everything was a disaster. You had earthquakes, floods, avalanches. It's like Marvel movies nowadays. Pat says, I wanted to do something crazy. They were all standing there and said, you're crazy. This isn't going to work. people in the halls would stare and say, you're crazy. When people tell me it's a crazy idea not to do it, I'll do it and catch people's attention. And of course, we were talking about an amazing innovation known as the Shaker motor. And this would become Earthshaker, which is a disaster theme from February of 1989. It is a Williams System 11B, sells 5,257 units, so significantly higher in sales than his previous machine. It's design, of course, by Pat Lawler. Art by Tim Elliott. Sound and music by John Hay and the legend Chris Graner. And software by Mark Panaccio. I don't think it's Panaccio. There's no EO.
    36:04
    We should probably figure out how to say his name, being he was just hired by CERN. He could email me a WAV file of him saying his name. Okay. Take that.
    36:20
    I have played a lot of Earthshaker. I've got a buddy of mine who just picked up an Earthshaker, and I played a lot of it. I really like Earthshaker. It's a very cool game. Have you played the sinking building version? No, I have not.
    36:33
    It's a moving experience. That was very good. Yes, it was a moving experience. Directly from the Williams paperwork here. Williams continues to shake up the world of pinball. Okay. Discover state-of-the-art advances in quality, dependability, reliability, and entertainment value. And this was yet another one of the games that had a limited number of diamond plate versions again. You should be able to see all the other games.
    37:07
    It had a, originally it had a moving building. The building would sink into the play field, but that was cost cut. but it still has a super cool it has like the state of california and right where the fault line is it actually opens up so the ball can roll across and diverts it it is that is such an amazing mech it is like this game is just so much fun it's so you know some people describe pat lawler's designs as like just fun and energetic and childish and i would totally agree that this game is is probably one of the most make you smile games that he's been able and as we go through these games you will notice like almost every one of his games has some kind of new mech or some new thing some new mechanical thing that's super cool something that something that makes you think like wow this is different than pin than pinball was you know this this machine is a way out on the edge they weren't really sure what distributors would think about this shaker motor You put this thing in the bottom of the cabinet, and it's going to literally shake the machine. This is the first time this has ever been done. You know, that's kind of leading edge, and that's taking a chance. And often, as we can see with a lot of designers and distributors nowadays, taking chances is not something they like to do. So when it came down to costing, you said before that they removed the building so that they could keep the shaker motor, because the shaker motor added to that sort of ambience and theme where a moving building... Yeah, they removed the motion of the... The building was still there. It just didn't do anything. So Williams was going to do the first 250 machines with this shaker motor inside, and they convinced Pat to do it as an add-on for distributors to purchase afterwards. That way they wouldn't offend anybody who didn't want it. And they never sold a single one of these kits because the shaker motor was such a massive hit, they included it in every single machine. So, like, how does a shaker motor work? Well, it's a motor with weights, and they spin. The faster they spin, the more it shakes. That sounds dangerous to have that in your cabinet. It's encased. Oh, it's got a little case on it. Yes, it's all encased, so the weights are not going to fly off or anything. I guess those are the things that people would worry about at the time. So it's mounted in the bottom of the cabinet. When you do certain things, it shakes. Earth shaker! Did you know Data East used the shaker a lot? Yes. So Joe Kamenkow, of course, took that shaker motor idea, and he f***ing put it in every game from like 1991 to 1993. How could they do that? Didn't Williams patent it? They patented everything else. Yeah, so apparently Williams did not patent the shaker motor. It was up to the company at the time to do all the paperwork and fill out all the documentation, and at the time they just didn't think it was something that would take off. But Joe Cam and Cal, when he sees an idea that's going to make money, boy, oh, boy, he drives that into the ground until it stops making money. And now basically the Shaker Motor is – at least Shaker Motor support is coded into almost every game from every manufacturer now. I have a Shaker Motor in my Tron, and I'll tell you what, man. It is awesome. Shaker Motors are awesome. I'm going to be unpopular here, but I do not use the Shakers. I have them in several of my games, and I've actually forgotten which ones because I always turn them off. All right. And that is the end of Silver Ball Chronicles series. So thank you, my folks. I would leave it on an Earthshaker because it makes sense. Huh. A lot of people, that's like a must-have mod. They're putting a Shaker on everything. And if I had a road show, I would definitely have to have a Shaker in there. What about your Jurassic Park? Are you going to put a Shaker motor in that? No. Come on, man. That's like the whole part of the frigging movie with the dinosaur walking and rumbling in the cup with the water. I always wondered if you were in a tournament and like the shaker motor actually caused a tilt, that would be the end of the shaker motor. It would be the end of the machine. The art on the Earthshaker was by Tim Elliott, and he was the last person to work on a wall or pin before Pat signed an exclusivity deal with John Yossi. He's done the artwork for every one of his games ever since. Which I think is kind of neat. Now, this is a very cool backlash. So it's like this 1950s, you know, guy with his part and his hair is just gorgeous as a guy who's got a receding hairline. It makes me very jealous. It's with a lady who's doing her makeup. And it's sort of like this California cool pink Cadillac thing. One thing that's very reminiscent or one thing that's interesting about Pat Lawler games, they always have a lot of these like random odd characters in the background. just these funny sort of characters that are all getting into some sort of shenanigans i was always thought it was funny that the game says oh bitchin yeah which is a pretty big uh big uh risk back in the day or that was just like the lingo they were using that's bitchin yeah that's true that's what i always took it as what's going on bro so there's like a lady in the background walking her dog and she's getting you know she's falling over there's a guy being thrown out of his car he's like this annoying kind of yuppie business person with his cell phone in his car there's an la map things are weird man like it's kind of a fun little uh little back glass there and it's mirrored come on mirrored back glass so what was what do you think earth shaker's response was when people actually got to see and feel the earth shaker concept i think it made a ton of money it made a ton of cash and i've spelled that t-o-n-n-e oh the correct way to spell that canadian spelling that is the correct spelling yes okay pat lawler would say internally there were usual politics being played and earthshake got the bum rush because of what was coming so what what game was coming after earthshaker oh okay we'll give everybody a moment if you said black knight 2000 you would be correct that's right So cutting the production was allegedly because a German distro didn't like the game, which I would assume was their main German distributor, who I should remember their name, because they bought like 70, 80 percent of Williams games. Yeah. So the Black Knight 2000 game, of course, was was a pretty was a pretty big hit. Of course, it is the return to Steve Ritchie's Black Knight series, the second in the trilogy. Of the German distro, Pat would say he wield a great deal of dollars and power. Years later, he would come to me and apologize for not building 3,000 to 4,000 more units. That must have made Pat feel pretty great that it was a bit of an issue there with cutting that short. And when you have Steve Ritchie, the Steve Ritchie, and you've got the new guy building his second game, one that's a bit strange and it's not the Black Knight, you can't blame the distributor for going out of his way. and trying to get what he thought was a bigger hit. The interesting thing is how they just wouldn't rerun games, even when they were original themes, and they could have just went back and did more. They just had their set schedules, and once the game stopped, that was it. The interesting thing here is Black Knight 2000 sold 5,700 units. Earthshaker sold 5,200 units. So it's not like there's a big smash hit of 10,000 units here from Steve Ritchie. So, you know, those internal politics being played at Williams certainly probably burned Earthshaker. Yeah, it probably would have sold at least 8K or more. Wow, you think that many, eh? Huh. So that would bring us to Pat Lawler's next game, Whirlwind. And that, of course, was another disaster theme. This is January 1990. It's a Williams 11B. Sells 7,304 units. So we can see that there's some creep up in sales here with Pat Lawler's design. Art by John Yossi, and as you mentioned before, this is the first game with John Yossi and Pat Lawler, and Pat Lawler will work with nobody but John Yossi from now until all the way to today. Sound and music by the legend Chris Granner, and software by Bill Futsenruder. This is very classic Pat Lawler when it comes to disaster theme. It's a tornado. It's terrorizing the countryside in Kansas. Oh, did you hear recently that the governor's mansion in Kansas was destroyed in a tornado? No, I didn't. Lame joke incoming. The storm was so bad, it almost took out the whole trailer park. Uh-huh. So the Translight art, John Yossi is the radio driver in the car. So if you look at the back glass, there is an individual who's driving a van. He's holding a button. It is the Storm Blasters. That is a self-portrait of John Yossi. We also see the red button, which will become a Pat Lawler trademark. I believe it was the logo of his company. It's like a thing. Don't push the red button. So, of course, we spoke in a lot of our art episodes and a lot of other previous podcasts that artists would often use photographs and have some members of the art team or the design team or family members pose so that they could get those designs right. Actually, the reference of this was John Yossi had his wife, Jenny, take a photograph of him kind of standing in that position. And that's how he drew himself sitting in the car. John Yossi and Pat Lawler are all about their tiny back glass references. Isn't that right? That is right. So John Yossi would say, I was asked to put hidden things in games now and then, and, you know, it was benign stuff. I didn't put it in anything shocking. And we could see that other designers, they were all about putting in shocking stuff. John also said, Doug Watson and I split this game up. Another one of those beautiful play fields, plastics, and all that stuff. I did the back glass and cabinet. I had a lot of fun with it and had a lot of freedom. Now, John Yossi, he would spend a lot of his later career working for large companies like McDonald's and Coca-Cola, and they wouldn't give you that kind of freedom where you could kind of put in fun stuff in the background. They were very on-brand, very focused. As long as it was a licensed, it was an unlicensed game, you could pretty much get away with anything. So because this is such an interesting position in Pat Lawler's career, it's the first time that he spent a great deal of time with John Yossi. I want to go into this back glass in a little more detail than maybe most that we have. So there's a child in a crashing car with his head out the window with a huge, huge camcorder taking a video of the storm, of the whirlwind. Super not safe, not wearing a seatbelt and looking out the other way. Now there's a dog with his head out the window and his hands over his eyes. Covering his eyes. It's pretty funny. Well, John Yossi would say, we've always had English setters, so the dog is a cartoony version of a goofy setter. There's also that hand button. So you had mentioned that hand button. There's the child, the boy, he's wearing a Williams hat. No, he's not. There's three versions of the Whirlwind Backglass. So John Yossi and Pat Lattwaller are both Cubs fans. So in the original run of Translates, the kid's wearing a Cubs hat. But the legal guys frowned on it. So a sticker was applied to the first run of Translites covering the C with the Williams W. And then all new Translites were made with just the W, the Williams logo. So if you have a whirlwind, jam your face up there real close and see if there's a sticker on it. Yeah. I know someone who has the Translite and it has the sticker. That's so cool. Do you think that would actually be worth more or do you think that's just something that nerds like you and I think is cool? Both. Because nerds, i.e. pinball pinheads, think it's cooler, yes. I would put it in my listing as, you know, original Cubs Translite. Give me another ten bucks. The flyer, come on. Feel the power of the wind. Very whimsical way to say it there, Ryan. So wait a minute, why are we feeling the power of the wind? What gimmick do we have on this game? Well, I don't know if you knew this or not, But Whirlwind was creating a stir for the 90s and beyond. Did you know that added attractions blow the competition away? Did you know that? I did indeed know that because Williams made sure they put it on a flyer. I love flyers. This has, like, what, top three, top five topper of all time? It has a fan on the top of the pinball machine that under certain times, it blows wind on you like you're in a whirlwind ron yep the funny thing is the game was basically done they just put that on there as like a joke like wouldn't it be funny if we had a fan on top of it that just turned on and they put a fan on there and they turned it on and they're like we have to do this so pat waller had his program like you need to program this in and within a couple days they had it working they were three weeks away from launch when bill foots and reuter and Pat were playing a game in the factory and having a good old time. Pat would say the balls were in the air. They were going in all directions because of the whirlwind wheels on the playfield. Somebody said, wouldn't it be funny if a fan blew on you? So we grabbed a desk fan and we put it on the machine and turned it on. We laughed uncontrollably. That top five or like top three topper of all time was like, let's just stick it on the top. That is awesome. That is amazing inspiration, and it shows you how a team and the creative process brings something together and makes it that much better. And the creative process. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah. Did you know that Williams Legal was not a huge fan? They were concerned. Really? Because they were afraid someone, like maybe they're smoking their cigarette and the fan comes on and blows it back in their face, that kind of thing. Oh, man. Imagine somebody smoking that didn't want smoke in their face. Mm-hmm. So Williams, of course, was always willing to bend over to make something great, which was certainly different than the other manufacturers. We've talked about Gottlieb at the time. Not so much about making sure that they added expense to a game. It seemed that management was always there to be able to identify something like this fan that they knew would sell more units. So that's pretty amazing. So they mentioned the spinning whirlwind wheels. So what am I talking about there? There's spinning discs on the play field. You basically got like a grippy surface on them too. So when the balls hit them, they just go flying in all directions. Another Pat Lawler staple. He likes things that just move the ball around, whether it's spinning discs or magnets. Either of them. He doesn like balls just in the middle of the play field not reacting to something obviously These spinning discs on play field were not common but they not it not a new design right you had the original fireball the fireball remake yeah they had since the 70s they've they've been on machines before but distributors hated them because they had they required a lot of adjustments so uh pat lawler and uh his engineering team set out to make sure that they could come up with some sort of leveling system on the bottom of the play field to be able to help level that out much simpler than the previous versions. And it was all run, all three discs are run by one motor. Apparently, these motors that drove the discs are different in the European models because of European safety approvals. But in general, they tried to make it much better than the previous versions. Now, of course, there's no Larry DeMar or anybody on Whirlwind. Larry has disappeared from doing a lot of his programming work. And why was that? He was busy working on their upcoming new system, WPC, Williams Pinball Controller. Around this time, there's a lot of competition out there. We're getting into when pinball is way getting – Oh, it's hot. It's hot. And this game is right on the cusp of that hot growing market. There's a lot of really cool bits on Whirlwind. I've never played a Whirlwind. I really, really want to. Wow, you've never played a Whirlwind. That's criminal. I know. I've played a lot. I've played a lot of Earthshaker. I haven't played any Whirlwind. A lot of that comes to the fact that I have spent the last year and a half under lockdown and haven't been able to get to any shows. And I'll have to say again, there was a certain number of whirlwinds that were diamond plate again.
    54:21
    Now this has a couple of really cool features. One of them is that Pat Lawler again is pulling out a third flipper. He's doing a side sort of Ritchie-esque shot, which goes up into a ramp on the left side. which then comes around and just drops in the play field unlike a c richie game that would just feed it to you right so it just sort of it's a fun shot but there's there's not there's not much excitement about no it's exciting especially when you get a jackpot with it you will you will be excited at the time gotlieb was recycling this mech almost all the time in their machines and that is like a ramp with a lift so the ramp will lift up and you can shoot under the ramp and that's the seller shot right or that's the what is that shot that's the toll booth i don't know exactly what it's called because the seller's the scoop right so there's like there's two scoops on the left side and a shot through the pops now this is this is a very big uh pat lawler thing is a shot through the pops he loves the shot through the pops he likes a lot of pops this yes this is this is the first game where he's like okay there is a orbit through the pops shot through the pop now earth shaker had a shot into the pops into like a weird capture scoop thing and then it just sort of out the side into the flipper but you know this one is an actual sort of shot that kind of you want to get it right up in between the pops and around the corner which is an awesome shot you got to admit this also has a couple of diverters and pat lawler is all about diverters right he likes diverters he loves diverters so you shoot up into that sort of major toll booth shot, it goes up around, and then it'll divert it to the flipper or into a lock on the left side. Which he likes. He's used that before. He has used that before. Now, Pat Lawler has this design philosophy where he puts three lanes on the left, or sometimes on the right, and two lanes on the right. He's able to sort of squeeze that bottom play field together. It's like his thing. Yeah, the flippers are usually offset to the right. and he's got stuff on the left so this game would sell 7 300 units and what was released right after that game i don't know rock rock rock and roller games rock so it sold so roller games was the next game and it only sells 5 000 units so there's some redemption yeah for pat lawler against the evil steve richie whirlwind's a better game i said so good i said it didn't you sell your roller games working on it wow the funny thing is mine is a very early production brawler game so the shooter gauge is actually a whirlwind shooter gauge because it's the previous game super cool so this brings me to i would say oh one of my absolute favorite games ever ever ever ever of all the all the lcd games and dmd games and and of course we're going to talk about Adam's family coming up and all that stuff. Of all of those games, man, I love Funhaus. That's right, Biff. So it's a creepy, creepy-ass clown carnival theme. He's not a clown. He's a dummy. It's November of 1990. It is a Williams WPC. So this is this new board set that Larry DeMara is working on. It sells 10,751 units. art by john yosey sound and music the legend chris granner and john hay software by larry and a fellow named brian eddie so what do you think about this game uh i think if i made a horror movie about a pinball machine that comes to life this would be the game i'd use which i think i think this is in a horror movie this game it was made in the last year or so Oh, man. So the theme. Wow. It is like it is like an amusement park fun house. There's you know, it's it's exactly that. It is it is a perfect, creepy ass game. Well, what makes it creepy? We keep saying that. Well, Pat Lawler says, I always wanted to do a game with a big talking head. The head was going on the play field, yakking away at you and you get to whack it back with the ball. Pat Lawler's all about amazing mechanical bits. He's able to mix mechanical, physical toys like almost no other pinball designer. And Rudy, this mechanical talking head is a great example of that. But before we get into Rudy, so you remember Comet, right? We talked about that under our previous Python Angelo episode. Yes, I do. So there was Riverview Amusement Park, which was in Chicago or outside of Chicago. They had a funhouse there called Aladdin's Castle, and the mouth was the entrance to this funhouse, and the eyes were huge, and they moved around. That sounds scary. So funhouses are just creepy. I don't know if they meant them to be creepy, but they just are. And of course, Barry Ousler was the roller coaster theme park guy. So Pat's kind of moving into somebody else's territory there, especially when he's taking inspiration from the exact same amusement park that Barry took for Comet.
    60:13
    A valuable financial advisor doesn't just provide investment and insurance advice. That's because an advisor takes the time to gather intimate knowledge about their primary client, understand their personal preferences, recognize their fears and hopes, and gain knowledge about their client's heirs before providing financial advice. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. We're also doing secure online meetings to engage with clients who need advice but don't necessarily want to wear pants or leave their house. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only. Now let's get into Rudy. Rudy's a talking head. So this started from an idea where John Yossi did some preliminary sketches. He just sort of sketched something together with a head on a playfield. So Rudy was designed by John Crutch. It was basically Pat's engineer. He'd work with him from 1988 to 2005.
    61:24
    Pat would say John did all the magic. And the thing is, I believe John Crutch worked, he worked at like a toy factory or something where he was making, it gave him the background to make that insane mech that is rudy's head williams had just a monopoly on these amazing engineers especially in that sort of 19 like 88 to to the 1996 they just had amazing engineers the thing is uh one of the stories pat told was when he was describing this game to his engineering team and he was describing his i'm gonna have this head it's gonna do this it's gonna do that and the engineering team they thought it was more like the captain bazaar head if you remember that from party zone like one of his small heads and there's a way but you're gonna hit it with the ball and all how big is his head so pat gets a block of wood the size of rudy's head and puts it on the play field and said this is how big the head's gonna be and they're there like how are you gonna fit that on the play field he said that's my problem you need to get it to work it's it's really big like when you when you when you get in there and you see it like in person you're like wow it has like this imposing it's more than a bash toy it is something else and it is a defining feature of this machine it is just amazing eyes move eyelids move mouth is on a motor the coating that went into getting that because he snores and the mouth moves like an emotion when he's snoring and all that. It's crazy. So naming Rudy, of course, is a big deal. And it is perfect. It is named absolutely perfect, right? Because the character himself is a bit of a douche. Yeah, yeah. And he mocks you and he teases you and he's rude. So Rudy was perfect. Well, Pat Lawler said, I showed it to my wife, Cassandra, and I said, what should we call the dummy? And she replied, call him Rudy. There you go. That's amazing. She just like pops that up out of nowhere. And everyone at Williams didn't even know what to expect. They all expected to some sort of small kind of articulated like dummy head. You touched on the programming. Now, Larry DeMar designs the board set here, WPC. This is the first WPC game. And programming this head to be talking, to snore, to look around the play field with his eyes. That doesn't that's not easy. Agreed. So it took Larry DeMar hundreds of hours to design the script and language to actually make Rudy talk naturally. And Ed Boon of Mortal Kombat fame is the voice of Rudy. They made his eyes follow the ball. And then we actually somewhat mentioned this, I believe, in our, I think it was our John Borg episode with Jurassic Park when they had it on test. They actually had Williams people looking at to see if they were stealing their patented technology when the dinosaur follows the ball. Yes. They patented it on this game. So Rudy's eyes follow the ball, and it took the sound and music guys hundreds of hours to get the voice right. Because at first they thought it was too cartoonish, too dark and creepy. And finally they got the voice where they wanted it. If you ever played it at midnight, basically Rudy gets angry. The funhouse closes. He wants you out of there. You get to hit him a lot. That's always so good. That's the best part. Not only do you have this incredible toy, but you can just bash it in the face over and over again. When Rudy gets angry, the tone of the game actually changes, right? It's no longer sort of like fun and him sort of taunting you. He gets angry, he gets mad, and then the tone and everything just changes. And to get him to sound right, you don't want him to be childish when he's angry, like cranky. You want him to be angry, and the person becomes slower and more stern when they start talking, which is pretty amazing. When Rudy falls asleep at midnight, he starts to snore. And not only does he just sort of snore, his jaw like quivers. Yeah. Right with the snoring. Yeah. Pat Lawler said, and this was on his TopCast interview, when they had the thing all set up, they had Neil deCastro, the president of Williams, come down and play the game. He just played the game once and he turned to him and said, guys, don't f*** this up. This is so cool. I can't imagine not selling a zillion of these. It's something else. When I first saw this game, I was like, oh, man, that guy, that is cool. And then when I started playing it, immediately you recognize this is special. This is different. There is something going on here that is not like any other pin, especially at the time. Yeah, what they banked on was, you know, you walk by it and you see the head. Like, okay, what does the head do? You got to play at least one game to see what the head does. It's captivating. It's fun. It's unusual. it taunts you you're a big fan of games that mock you all in one this is an amazing package if you take training with the Disney Institute what they do is they sort of train you on the Disney philosophy and you can do that in Orlando and you can do it online now of course I took this course with Disney there's a whole sort of section on the Tiki Hut are you familiar with the Disney Tiki Hut? No. I'm just curious about this whole Disney course. Do they just tell you to buy every property and then ruin it like they did with Star Wars? Yeah. The Tiki Hut is an experience down in Orlando. I assume they have one in California. You go to the Tiki Hut and it's like a musical experience where the birds talk to you and they sing a song in the Tiki Hut. If you've been there, you now have that song just stuck in your head. You'll have it there for days. Sounds like I would hate it, yeah, as most Disney things are. What they do, though, is they talk about how they suck you into that experience with things that you don't even notice. For example, the animatronic birds. Walt Disney was very adamant that those birds look like they're breathing, that their chests move. And the majority of people will not notice that these birds have moving, breathing chests. But what it does is subconsciously you see it as being more realistic, even though you may not notice it. Things like the way Rudy reacts, the way his eyes move, the way his jaw quivers when he snores, that is the exact same philosophy, is that it immerses you without even knowing it. And this is a very special game, and this is why I put it amongst some of the top games ever, and one that I would certainly love to have. So if you're keeping score at home, we have a vertical play field, we have a shaker motor, we have a fan, and now we have a talking animatronic head. This guy, he's just pulling it every game. It's sort of like Steve Ritchie's earlier career, right? Where it's like everything he does is just something new and amazing. One thing that I really love about Pat is that he's able to really recognize and celebrate his team. It doesn't just take one designer to make a game. It really takes an entire team of talented people. Pat, throughout various interviews, seminars that he's done at Pinball Expo, he's made sure that he was able to point out the amazing team that is able to do those. There were over 20 people that actually worked in making this very special game. It truly is a team effort. Well, you know, Steve Ritchie often says there's one dad, the person that controls the project and inspires creativity. But it's truly the team that brings it all together. And they sold over 10,000 fun houses. Now, it's been a long time since Williams has sold 10,000 units. What was it, probably Black Knight? Been a while. Oh, no, what am I saying? No, High Speed. High Speed sold 100. Oh, yeah, that's right. And don't forget, again, the first 100 or so, Diamond Plate Playfield. Yeah, so we've brought this whole Diamond Plate thing up before. So, like, let's talk about that a little bit, okay? Because it's probably driving people crazy. Clear coding. Yeah. Yep. A company came in with this idea, and they experimented with it, usually maybe 50, 100, a couple hundred every run of these games. Most of them ended up being Lawler games because he was one of the champions of this new process. So it's on all the games we just mentioned, but it's also, like, on Roller games. It's on, I think, Diner. There's a Diners with it. And basically all it is, it's just clear coat. So what Williams was doing before this is they were doing full playfield mylars. Originally there was nothing and just wear to hell. So they started putting a thick mylar down on the playfield when they started getting into the faster games, more ramps, more speed. So you just have a full playfield mylar. And then they started experimenting with this diamond plate. Yeah, so some of the big complaints among the distributors were, hey, I got this game, and like 24 months later, the slings are all blown out around there. It's all scratched up. The paint's coming off. Nobody wants to play a game that looks like crap. You know, they had to come up with some sort of method. You said it themselves. It was adding Mylar, right? So sometimes they'd put some Mylar around the slings or the pop pumpers. But that's just a Band-Aid, right? Yeah, and Sun was the company that came in with this new process. So Pat would say that it's about $20 extra per play field to clear coat it at the time to put this diamond plate technology. And he would say it's not every day that a sales guy comes in and pitches an idea that you can do, which is simple, fast and cheap. And can't be replicated today, obviously, as we are having clear coat issues. But I have a feeling what they were spraying it with would probably not pass health and safety standards, health and safety standards today. Yeah, and you had mentioned you just can't change everything, right? You just can't. This team can't come in and you go, yeah, let's go ahead and just every single play field. They did about a three-year burn on it from the first ones until they actually went full production. And the risk was that two years down the road, there'd be like big chunks ripping off the play field or massive cracks. Oh, that's just today. It started to prove that it was actually a very good idea. Now, of course, there were certainly some concerns about this diamond plate idea, right? Yeah, there's always the concern that, well, you have the quote right here, Python Angelo, polycarbonate playfields. We tried that idea, but it would put us, i.e. Williams, out of business. The playfield wouldn't wear or ever need to be replaced. Pat Waller didn't think of diamond coat. Bullshit idea. We needed to sell machines. Python's critique here, which may not be his own personal critique, but the critique within Williams at the time was... You want him nowhere out. You want this playfield to wear out because you wouldn't buy a new pinball machine, right? If the playfield looked like it rolled off the factory floor. It depends. I can see. Pat Lawler would actually say, are we cutting our own throat? The people in engineering convinced the executives that selling you a machine on it lasting longer than on selling it as a replacement to the old product that didn't last longer was a better idea. So do you think that that was a mistake? Do you think clear coat and diamond plate was actually a mistake? that it would impact sales? There's good arguments either way. I really think so. I mean, especially when the next Pat Lawler game comes out and sells the way it does, why do I need to replace it? It still looks good. Your machine wears out. You've got to go back to Williams, buy a new machine. You're going to keep going. Now, my critique on this is that pinball machines have evolved, and especially during this time, that the features, the toys, the mechs, the experience continued to evolve. So if you still wanted to keep getting the quarters, you would have had to buy a new machine with the new innovations in technology. Firepower is not going to earn the same as whirlwind, right? And that has nothing to do with it wearing out and everything to do with the advancement in technology. Yeah. And Pat Lawler said, you can't convince me of it. If your company isn't able to build a good product, if you can't build a better one than ours, if we aren't good enough at building new entertainment, then we shouldn't be around. Yeah, so Pat Lawler agrees with me. Thank you, Pat Lawler. So there was a new name here that popped up, and I don't want to just sort of gloss over this, and that's Brian Eddy, or Brain Eddy.
    73:56
    Yeah, you call him that throughout your show notes here. I do. So he did a lot of the flashers and some of the display effects and animations on the alphanumeric displays. So he's sort of learning the ropes, right? He's learning the WPC system. And that's the thing about Funhaus. It's a WPC alphanumeric game. So it's running on the new system. And they could do some cool little effects with the alphanumeric display. About as much as you could ever do. The only reason you even downloaded this episode.
    74:29
    We are in March of 1992. This is the Addams Family. It is a licensed movie theme. It is a Williams WPC. but it's a DMD this time. It sells 20,270 units.
    74:50
    Art by John Yowsey. Design, of course, Pat Lawler. Music and sound by the legend Chris Graner. Software by Larry DeMar and Mike Boone. Da-na-na-na.
    75:07
    All right. So this is the peak of peaks of peaks of peaks of peaks. Licensing has finally come to Williams. We had all seen Steve Ritchie's high speed as a watershed moment in the history of pinball. Would you agree with that? Yeah, it was definitely the beginning of the resurgence. You know, the people like Dwight Sullivan, people like Pat Lawler played high speed. They were inspired. They saw, oh my goodness, there could be a story. There could be a world under glass.
    75:46
    No other pinball had told a story. You know, it had brought a video game to pinball. But Pat Lawler also learned that theme was everything. Theme wasn't just something you threw away. And the William designers, of course, they were very proud people. They were very proud because not only could they make a fun game that sold and earned, but they were so creative that they could come up with their own themes. Data East had come around and they had cracked licensing. Of course, this wasn't lost on Pat Lawler. It wasn't lost on Williams. Like, could you imagine if Rudy was Bart Simpson? Oh, God. Don't have a cow, man. Boom, and you hit him. They would have sold 20 or 30,000 fun houses, right? Like, it would have just supercharged an already amazing thing. So getting a license was all of a sudden important in pinball, where before, maybe not so much. Well, Pat said, Adam's family happened because of a lunch I had with Ken Fedesna. I was negotiating a new contract then. Ken said, these people in Hollywood are doing an Adam's family movie. You could do a haunted house theme. It was my favorite show as a kid, and I wanted to do it. Roger Sharp knew it was dumped by one studio and picked up by another studio. So Roger did some calls, and they agreed to have Bally Williams do a pinball machine. and lucky for them the movie ended up being a hit and it was a monster license at the time especially like it was a great movie uh we'll talk about that in a minute but roger sharp he's the man that saved pinball but to be honest the most important thing that roger had ever done in pinball was being the liaison between a bally williams and pinball manufacturers and all of the fun social connections that he had in hollywood to create licensing so as soon as it became a thing. Roger Sharp really blew up. Now, the Addams Family license, okay, so let's dive into this a little bit. Why was this such a big theme, especially in the early 90s? Well, the Addams Family is a fictional household created by an American cartoonist called Charles Addams in 1938. The Addams Family is a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th century American family. They're an odd, wealthy, aristocratic family who delighted in the black arts and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening. It was originally published in the New Yorker magazine. The Addams Family that everybody remembers, right, Ron, is the Addams Family TV show of the 1960s. Is this something that you watched? Uh, not really my era, but I have seen episodes, yes. Yeah so when I was younger in the 1990s I was a big Nick at night TV watcher I think that comes from my mother My mother watches television on a 20 to 25 year delay So today my mother is watching shows from 20 years ago 20 years ago my mother was watching shows from 20 years before that from 40 years from today she just watches tv on a delay i don get that i watched a lot of adam's family i watched a lot of monsters i watched a lot of get smart there's an amazing license by the way stern pinball this 30 minute television series was created by David Levy and Donald Saltzman and was shot in black and white. It aired for two seasons on ABC from September 18th, 1964 to April 8th, 1966. It had a total of 64 episodes, which is pretty interesting to have such a huge culture challenging show and only having 64 episodes. Now, the show, of course, was most notable for its opening theme, which was composed and sung by Vic Mizzi. That theme again, Ron. Da-da-da-da-da. Most of the humor of this TV show derives from the fact that the Adamses have this culture clash with the rest of the world. They inevitably treat normal visitors with great warmth and courtesy, even though the guests expressed confusion and fear and dismay at the decor of their house, the sight of Lurch, their servant, and Thing, their disembodied hand in a box.
    80:15
    And that was because there was a person under the table. Some visitors, of course, had bad intentions to steal their money, which the family generally ignored and they ended up suffering no harm whatsoever. Another big TV show at the time was Munsters. So why was this show sort of culturally impactful? Well, one of them was that at the time, the idea was that people might look different and be different, but you should judge them by their actions and you should judge them by their hearts, not their outside. And that, of course, comes from the fact that there was a significant cultural change with the African-American community in the United States. This was a big, big show, wasn't it? Sure.
    80:58
    Nothing else? I got nothing. it's not it's not my era so this is what inevitably would inspire the 1991 movie the adams family so this uh movie's basis is that gomez adams had a falling out with his brother fester adams from the tv show who then left the family after 25 years a person resembling fester returns turns out it is actually fester with amnesia but what he does is he tries to infiltrate the family and steal their fortune on behalf of his mother oh so fester's the bad guy i've never seen the movie so you haven't seen the adams family movie she spoiled it spoilers it is really really good i saw this movie in 1991 in the theater with my family there was a sequel of course because you got to cash in but the the ah man this is a great movie i recently watched this movie again about six months ago during lockdown uh with my wife i love this movie this movie just is so silly it's so fun and it's so well acted the casting is just just just brilliant so this had a 30 million budget it had uh 191.5 million dollar gross now it only scores a 64 on rotten tomatoes so paramount did a test with random people on the street doing the adams family song and asking them what song it was 80 percent of people knew that what the song was this is a monster license 80 percent of people know that song and know that term so this is a this is a license that's universally known across sort of a lot of a lot of people clay harold who is was the host of top cast he would actually say that no pinheads actually played adam's family but casual players hang off of it it'll sit next to his new modern sterns like pirates or spider-man and it still out earns them so that would have been like in 2007 he said that yeah to in 2007 the adams family still out earns pirates of the caribbean by stern and spider-man the steve richie masterpiece so originally pat wanted to take the back box and make it like a dollhouse and the house would have separate rooms with stuff in it but of course that wasn't able to be done because of the costing so back in the shark tank mentality imagine proving all the naysayers wrong like python angelo who said adam's family isn't pat lawler's it's roger sharps it was roger sharp and larry demars design pat lawler never thanked me for keeping the bally line alive so he could make adam's family wow isn't that a great quote if you've ever heard the python angelo top cast you need to listen to it he does not like pat I like Pat Waller. Did you know Adam's family has a topper? A factory topper. Of course. Another one of those epic toppers. How much do you think that topper cost?
    83:59
    $1,000? No. No, no, no. It has lights in it, though, right? $800? No. Oh, you're being funny because of the current topper prices. This is coming from the guy who's got the R2-D2 topper. So they got the idea from the topper because they had the script. The movie wasn't out yet. there was a scene that ended up being cut where the kids were on top of the roof generating lightning with a weather machine. Yeah, so the topper is the weather machine and the clouds and the whatever. It's on the back glass. Well, that was in the movie, but it was cut. One of the other times we ran into this was in our John Borg episode, Live in the 90s Licensed Dream, where they'll get the script ahead of time and then often bits will be cut from that script and then they're sort of stuck releasing a pin at the same time, even though it may not have parts that were in the movie. So in the movie, one of the major pieces is the vault, and this is where, of course, the money is stored in behind the bookcase. So Pat Lawler, the king of integrating licenses, there's this awesome little bash toy that looks like a bookcase, and then it rotates, and then you can kind of shoot right up in behind the bookcase. Originally, this didn't say anything on it. It was just the bookcase, and you just hit it. You can see these pictures in IPDB. I'll leave them in the show notes. Of course, then people didn't really know what to do with those original prototypes, so then they changed, put a sticker on it that said spell greed to rotate the bookcase to get into the vault. That almost sounds like Iron Man. They added the sticker that said spinners raise ironmonger. Yeah, because you didn't know what to do. Even though the game, I think, told you at some point. Hit the spinners to raise the ironmonger. A pinball experience for the whole family. It's creepy, kooky, spooky, and ooky. The Addams Family.
    85:54
    Very well done. Now there's some thing special in pinball. Oh, so what could this flyer be talking about that there's some thing special in pinball, Ron? The thing toy. This is amazing. So we just talked about how absolutely frigging awesome Rudy is. Well, this simple awesome toy thing is crazy. Yeah, there's a few innovations on it. So you have the optical sensor in the bookcase, which doesn't really get mentioned. There's no switch there. It's optic, so it detects the hits. Then it's got, of course, the thing, or thing, which is in the upper right, and he actually comes out of the play field, grabs your ball, and then goes back underneath the play field. Okay, so there's like a box in the back right. Thing's box, yeah. So there's this hand that comes out and grabs the ball. So how does that work? Basically it comes out via like a motor, and then there's a magnet on the hand, and it just grabs the ball from a saucer, then goes back in, releases the ball into a subway. And then it sort of trickles down underneath the play field somewhere else. And then it has Thing Flips, which I thought was one of the really cool features. It has a little mini flipper on the left called the Thing Flipper. It's Thing's flipper. And if you go down the correct in lane, again, there's multiple in lanes because this is a Pat Lawler game on the left side. If you go down the correct in lane on the left side, hit the ramp. When it comes around, Thing will shoot the, I believe it's the Swamp Shot himself without your intervention. Yeah, so the computer takes over and flips. You can flip yourself, but if you just let it go, it will flip for you. And it will detect if it missed it by what it hit, if it's early or late, and it will adjust over time. And it is surprisingly accurate. The thing with the Addams Family is it does things that surprise you. You know what I mean? It's not just shooting Rudy or a bash toy or ramps or whatever. Like it continually over the time you play and the deeper you play and the more you play little things you notice. Well, it'll start doing things which are pretty nuts. The thing hand is pretty cool. So, for example, in one of the modes, you shoot the saucer thing comes out, grabs the ball and puts it in and drops it in the subway. Right. But there's another moment where thing will come out. He'll grab the ball, put it back in. And then, you know, the narrator Gomez Adams. No, no, no. No, put that thing back. And then the hand comes back out, puts the ball back in the saucer, and then the hand goes back in. So it continually does these things to surprise you. Another one of those cool things is sort of this innovation called like auto-flipping. And the thing flips is part of that. But there's a little bit more to this auto-flipping, right? There is? What are you saying? So I've played this game, and the first few times you're kind of flipping the ball, the music and the sound is a big part of the adams family it's all in one package and a big part of that is that traditional adams family from the song the da da da snap snap and there's times where you'll drain the ball and what you'll do is you'll use the flippers yourself and it'll go and then you'll push the flipper buttons and you'll go snap snap just because you're you're having fun right you're kind of like involved in that music and you just can't help but like clap and of course your hands are on the flippers so you press the buttons but then all of a sudden the game itself will automatically flip those flippers to that beat and you freak out and you go oh my god the game did the thing yeah adam's family was the first game williams had well designed with solid state flippers so they could control it using their fliptronics one board which I believe it was only used on Adam's family. Pat Lawler would say that we gave people exactly what they expected.
    89:57
    The flipper was going to go da-da-da-da, snap, snap. Very cool. So, of course, that wasn't the first time they ever used auto flippers. There's a 1953 Williams game called Palisades, and the flipper will automatically flip when the ball lands in a pocket in front of the flipper. So it's not quite the same thing, but it's pretty cool. There's a Zachariah game that auto flips, which surprised me because I think it's a soccer-based game, and it's trying to get balls out of a certain area, so it would just automatically flip the flipper. So another neat bit is five pop bumpers. Yeah. So in the graveyard area, there's five pop bumpers all clustered together, which is a Gary Stern no-no because three is the magic number. It must be really hard to jam five pop bumpers into a playfield with all the mechanics under the playfield, all the solenoids, all the switches. Pat Lawler likes pop bumpers. Again, he's got that shot, right? That's that orbit shot right up through the pop bumpers that he started in Whirlwind.
    91:03
    Very reminiscent of him. He also has the electric chair shot, which is like your mode shot, isn't it? Yeah, it starts it. this one of your first mode-based games. They're not really called modes, but they're just windows of the mansion, tour of the mansion. And that's why I think it gets a certain reputation amongst pinball players in that you can just hit the ramp, hit the chair, hit the ramp, hit the chair, hit those two shots, and you can literally go through the entire game. Yeah, so, I mean, this is the beginning of that sort of era, right, when it comes to complexity of code. And John Norris, of course, he had done the lights, camera, action game at Premier Gottlieb. And that was really the first sort of quote-unquote mode-based game. But Pat would say that Adam's family was much further than lights, camera, action. Pat Lawler says that Adam's family walked right up to the ledge of not being understandable. It had modes. The rest of the industry followed it off a cliff. in the last 18 years everyone followed that template to make a pinball machine it hasn't changed since look at that pat lawler taking credit for designing and over complicating the entire industry for the last 20 years so humble one of the i think when it comes to adam's family sort of the the cherry on top is the sound package the call-outs, the music, the theme integration, to use another one of those sort of cliches. And originally, one of the actors of that movie, Angelica Houston, was asked to provide the call-outs, and she declined to do the custom call-outs. Chris Granner, in an interview, would say that he didn't really want to repeat her agent's response upon declining the pinball machine. I guess one could say, Ron, that pinball might be beneath some actors. Is that right? Yeah, and I think she also had to approve her likeness on the back glass, which took several attempts. Yeah, they needed to make her look maybe not quite as realistic as she did at the time. Maybe they wanted to make her look a little bit younger. Now, I can't find any real major quotes or anything on this. nobody really wanted to throw Miss Houston under the bus with her comments or concerns. But one could just sort of say that she didn't want to do it, and she wasn't really the nicest when it came to declining. Does that make sense? Makes sense. Yeah. She's still in the game, although her audio is lifted from the movie itself. Now, Chris Granner's interview on The Addams Family. I've got Chris Granner's interview where he talks a lot about this in the show notes, so feel free to listen to that podcast. It is worth a listen because Chris Granner is so excitable and so like childlike when he talks about this stuff. It's just it's so much fun to listen to him talk. I would love to meet this guy in person. And Chris Granner says, fortunately, we had Raul Julia. It was a stunning, awesome acting recording session. When you get to work with an actor of that caliber. Chris Granner went to New York City to meet Raul in a studio. And he would say that he seemed like sick or ill or kind of out of it. Yeah, Chris said, I thought he was stoned, altered or something. He was dim and slow on the uptake. I had to describe things to him a couple of different ways. Things took two times longer than expected. He was on Broadway, Shakespearean knights of the realm. He needed direction. Because he's such a formal actor, and we're not talking like Raul Julia wasn't just sort of like an actor, right? Like this guy was a proper Shakespearean fancy pants actor. Like he needed to be told and directed and inspired. Fancy pants. Yes. So Chris Granner would tell Raul, just give it a try. Then suddenly he looked up and said, it's Cousin It or Extra Ball. And he had transformed into Gomez Adams. Then as soon as the line was over, he'd go right back to being Raul Julia. It was a remarkable session, a spectacular session. Could you imagine with the caliber of that kind of, when you hear those call outs And he's just like this sort of dim, maybe stoned, weird, depressed guy. And then all of a sudden he comes out and he's Gomez Adams. And then he's not. That must be weird. So they sold a lot of Adams families. So this is the record-breaking pin. Now, I've made jokes on previous podcasts about Pat Lawler and his selling of pinball machines and being the top-selling pinball person of all time. It's a title I think he should be very proud of. The Addams Family sold 20,270 units, but there was also 1,000 special edition Addams Family gold editions. Yeah, two years later. So, for example, and this is not necessarily an industry order, but these are just some numbers that I've pulled out of the top-selling pins. The next top-selling pin was 8-Ball by Bally. We spoke about that in our Bally episode where it had a back glass that sort of looked like the Fonz. It's the Fonz. It was 20,230 units. We had Steve Ritchie's original The Flash, which sold 19,505 units. We had Bally's Playboy, which was a smash hit around the time of 8-Ball, sells 18,250. And of course, Steve Ritchie's Firepower at 17,410. so he is amongst some of the legendary great machines and designers of all time and he smashed those sales numbers absolutely smashed them because it's an all-in-one package right it's got fun shots it's it's surprising it's got the toys it's it's it it is an all-out record-breaking package and it deserves the title what do you think yeah it's it's a great game but whether pinheads are crazy about it or not it for a tournament play it is quite of monotonous you just hit the same two shots over and over but for an experience like if like a newbie i put him on that in a second my wife loves adam's family loves adam's family i enjoy adam's family um i haven't played enough of it it has a couple of shots i don't particularly like like i say how many did it sell what do i know it's all about what it sells so pat lawler wanted to commemorate the actual record-breaking game from the production line and he arranged to have it made in a gold cabinet so pat says the record-breaking game was number 20 232 that game is the one we all had our picture taken in front of and it's the one on the cover replay magazine the inside of the game was signed by every worker on the line that day so that machine was originally in the possession of the late gene cunningham yeah i wonder where that is now i don't know where that machine is now so if you bought an adams family from the late gene cunningham or his estate you got a nice little piece of history there uh this change caused uh several games in the run to subsequently have some strange bits so they had some gold accents in the lower cabinets and even some of the back boxes, which were originally blue. So you may have a, if you're on one of these later 20,000 to 32 plus, you might have a weird mixture of gold accents and blue accents on your cabinets. Larry DeMar would say, the way our line worked, the cabinets and back boxes were created separately than joined together. And this created a logistical problem for keeping gold with gold and blue with blue, along with the likelihood that we had more spoilage in back boxes and cabinets, or the other way around. It meant that a small number of games were mismatched. So, a lot of people are always on the search for an Addams Family gold, and we'll talk about that in a moment, but you actually might have an even more rare one if you have the mixed matched colors. A mixed matched Addams. So, Addams Family gold, it was from October 1994. It had gold accents such as metal ramps, gold legs and bolts, gold lettering, the vault plastic, the bumper caps, and things box were all gold. And each of the thousand gold machines includes a certificate signed by members of the design team and a gold plate containing the machine number on the lower right front of the machine. Machine number one is property of Pat Lawler himself. Pat Lawler's a nerd, like all of us, I would assume, and he knows that symbols and collectability and serial numbers and special editions are very important within the industry, and here's a prime example of that. Those Addams Family golds actually end up going for a lot more than a standard Addams Family. Isn't that right? Actually, yeah, I would think so, just because there's less of them. The only thing is there's also a special software on there that's different. It has, I think, an extra mode, and it may even have more speech by Raoul Julia. So I do notice that when a lot of people do updates, or they'll go and they will build their own Addams Family, or rebuild an Addams Family, they'll often build it to the gold standard. Or they might do that, but then they'll have the original ROM in it, though. At least in the tournament realm, no one wants to see the gold edition on a machine. Because it has something in there that just makes it a crappier tournament game. I don't even know what it is. So of those 1,000 Addams Family Golds, they sold every single one of them on day one. And Pat Lawler would say that they could actually have even sold more. Da-na-na-na.
    100:44
    Wait a minute. Your notes here say end of episode. No Twilight Zone? Nope. That's the end of Pat Lawler's career. No, no road show? No, no good gophers?
    100:55
    That's it. What I wanted to do is just sort of tie a nice bow on that beginning of Pat Lawler's career. He is at the peak of not only his career, but the industry. And they're going to give him a great adventure, which is the super pin and Twilight Zone. But we'll cover that under our next Pat Lawler episode. I want to leave you with a Pat Lawler quote Which I found very, very nice Pat says I grew up drawing games and being a game geek Which ended up serving me well I spent my life not knowing it Being in pinball Any other thoughts, Ron, on the beginnings Of Pat Lawler's career? All those games are very worth playing Every one is awesome That's the highest recommendation There are no duds in that bunch Every single game from Pat Lawler's early career is amazing. Every one. And they just get better and better and better and better. Every game had at least one or sometimes multiple new innovations or cool toy or something. Absolutely amazing. Well, thank you for joining me again this month, Braun. We've been doing this for 12 months. You have been a fantastic part of this podcast. Thank you for making me seem like I know what I'm doing. And thank you for editing. And thanks for the 12 months, Mr. Dennis. you can send your comments questions corrections and concerns to civil chronicles at gmail.com we look forward to all your messages and we read every one please subscribe to us on apple podcast google play or your favorite podcatcher turn on automatic download so you don't miss a single episode remember to leave us a five-star review nothing else just five-star review that way more people can find us you want to support the podcast need a new shirt swing on over to silverball swag.com and pick up a silverball chronicles t-shirt thank you stewie and no problem
    103:09
    sitting down there in texas not doing anything with no engineers nordmanitis is that what that's called yeah nordmanitis walking around just asking like Can I get an engineer? Is there an engineer anywhere? Anybody? Engineer. Anybody. Can I get an engineer?
    103:44
    Remember, after we record, I never listen to them, so you'll have to remind me what we did. Okay, so let me scroll back up here.
    103:56
    Oh, so much scrolling. Okay. Mmm, there. Sounds like an ad. Mododome, what's your price? I'm sorry. Originally, the king of the license, the king. Try again.
    104:28
    Deep breath. Okay. And not that it matters. The vid kids, the S is a Z. vid kids. You mean a Zed. So you can do those couple quotes if you want. Oh, let me finish my apple.
    104:48
    I was on mute. I was being good. Pat said it walked right up to the ledge. Uh-oh. Someone's at my door. Hold on.
    105:02
    Oh.