Episode 221: Olivia & Kayden Helm

Pinball Profile·podcast_episode·22m 39s·analyzed·Oct 4, 2019

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Phoenix pinball enthusiasts discuss Bells & Chimes, custom game design, and taking over ZapCon.

Summary

Jeff Teolis interviews Olivia and Katie Helm from Phoenix, Arizona, who are active members of the Bells and Chimes women's pinball community and operators of Outpost Cordelia arcade. They discuss their rapid progression from arcade game restoration to competitive pinball, their award-winning custom Black Hole retheme project featuring an LCD screen and scoop mechanism, and their upcoming role taking over coordination of ZapCon, Arizona's major pinball and arcade convention.

Key Claims

Olivia is ranked in the top 15 of women's pinball standings and around 1,400 overall on IFPA rankings, with a goal to break into the top 1,000
high confidence · Direct statement by Olivia during interview about her ranking goals
Phoenix Bells and Chimes chapter hosts 10 regular season events plus 2 additional events, with events hosted at 3-4 commercial venues and 5 different private collections
high confidence · Olivia and Katie describing their local chapter structure
Tilt Studio (their main league) had 68 people show up for its first season
high confidence · Katie stating attendance numbers for their arcade's first league season
Olivia and Katie took first and second place in their first Bells tournament about a year and a half ago, with Olivia winning the next two as well
high confidence · Olivia's direct recollection of early tournament results
They progressed from zero pinball machines to approximately 14-16 machines in their collection within about 4-5 months
high confidence · Katie describing their rapid acquisition and James mentioning current count of 16 machines

Notable Quotes

“It was a safe place to dip my toe in the water and see how I like playing in a group setting with all the other ladies”
Olivia @ early in interview — Describes how Bells and Chimes served as entry point to competitive pinball
“I love getting out and hanging out with the ladies, spending time in the hobby, meeting different people that host events... I also love the machines. They need help sometimes, and I'm usually the first one to roll up my sleeves and get in there and get dirty”
Katie @ early interview section — Highlights Katie's dual role as both social participant and technical maintainer
“If either one of us had tried to do this alone, it would have been nothing like the game we came up with”
Katie @ Black Hole project discussion — Emphasizes collaborative nature of their custom game design process
“You made a brand-new pin. You put an LCD in a scoop. With the exception of the play field wood itself, pretty much everything is new”
Jeff Teolis @ post-Black Hole discussion — Summarizes the extensive customization beyond simple retheme
“The one part of it that we still have a lot of refinement we need to really put in is the UI and the kind of sound call outs for the game. Because trying to marry the older style play field with the newer style of modern interface for a game just really adds a lot of work”
Olivia @ Black Hole technical discussion — Demonstrates understanding of interface design complexity and provides sympathy for professional manufacturer challenges
“We felt like was a really important thing to our community, and we want to make sure that keeps going”
Katie @ ZapCon coordinator discussion — Explains motivation for taking over major community event

Entities

Olivia HelmpersonKatie HelmpersonBells and Chimes (Phoenix chapter)organizationOutpost CordelialocationZapConeventTracy Lindbergperson Bowen KerinspersonPaul Santa Cruzperson

Signals

?
community_signal: Significant growth and engagement in Phoenix women's pinball community with Tilt Studio league hitting capacity (68 attendees) and need to rearrange home arcade for efficiency
high · Katie stating Tilt Studio 'maxed out the available machines' with 68 first-season attendees and needing to rearrange collection
?
community_signal: Bells and Chimes Phoenix chapter demonstrates strong, inclusive community structure with emphasis on learning and helping each other, monthly events at multiple venues, and fundraising for Project Pinball
high · Tracy Lindberg's emphasis that 'we're all here to learn, help each other,' monthly events, non-league fundraiser tournament
$
market_signal: Rapid growth pattern of women entering pinball ecosystem through social Bells and Chimes participation, progressing to machine ownership and competitive play; similar trajectory to Tracy Lindberg mentioned by Teolis
high · Olivia and Katie's progression from first Bells tournament to competitive IFPA rankings to machine ownership; Teolis noting 'many women' moving from social to ownership; machines 'tend to multiply'
?
product_strategy: Custom modification techniques including scoop installation requiring rail adjustment and playfield drilling, demonstrating advanced technical capability development in community restorers
high · Katie describing drilling/cutting scoop installation as 'scariest part' requiring rail adjustment; detailed explanation of playfield modifications
~
sentiment_shift: Post-interview empathy development: Olivia gains appreciation for professional game manufacturers' UI/integration challenges through hands-on experience with custom LCD integration

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.068

0:00

it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teels you can find our group on facebook we're also on twitter at pinball profile emails pinball profile at gmail.com and please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher we go to arizona which is always lovely in fact i wish i could go there maybe in a few more months when it gets a little cold here but let's go talk to olivia and Katie Helm right now. Hi, how are you? Great. Good. How are you doing? It is good to talk to both of you because I've seen you in the news a little bit lately. If you're a regular at the Phoenix Bells and Chimes, you will see both Olivia and Katie playing there. How important is Bells and Chimes to you? I'll start with you, Olivia. Yeah, so it's really my gateway drug into competitive pinball. It was a safe place to dip my toe in the water and see how I like playing in a group setting with all the other ladies and it's been great fun. We've had lots of different venues introduced me to a lot of the community and really got me going in trying to get into tournaments almost every week now. Katie, are you just as competitive or is it about the competition? Is it about hanging out with great people? Yeah, no, so I'm not competitive pretty much at all. I go totally for the social side of it. So we couldn't be a whole lot different in that regard. I love getting out and hanging out with the ladies, spending time in the hobby, meeting different people that host events and seeing the machines they have. And, you know, as pretty much everyone will attest to, I also love the machines. They need help sometimes, and I'm usually the first one to roll up my sleeves and get in there and get dirty right in the middle of a tournament if I have to. And that, to me, is a huge amount of fun. I am so envious. Anybody who knows me knows I can't fix a darn thing, and you do a lot of that. We will get to that as we talk about Outpost Cordelia in just a moment. But you mentioned with Bells and Chimes, the Phoenix chapter, you go to different host events. So how many different hosts are there in the Phoenix area? So we've had probably three or four commercial venues. And I think this year we've had five different private collections, including our own, of machines anywhere from eight to 16 machines in a home. So it varies from the couple years that we've been doing it. But there's a number of private collectors here with pretty good-sized collections that are great for competition because they often cross all eras. So we'll get EM, we'll get solid state, DMD, modern, often all in the same competition. Isn't that the best, too, when you have that nice variety and you get to see all the different eras? I also enjoy that, too, when I go to a private collection. Is there an era you prefer, Katie? I'm definitely a fan of the solid states. They're the most, I guess, straightforward in terms of rule sets. And as a non-competitive player, you know, I don't really want to have to stop and think about all the different ways I can get points to pile up. I just want to play them for fun. And for me, that's the era that really was just about, you know, clean, straightforward pinball action. I find leagues, and I assume Bells and Chimes is similar to that, when you're first playing a game, you might not know what to do. So I have my hand up. I'm like, tell me what to do. What do I do when I'm on the right flipper? What do I do on the left flipper? And when you talk about solid states, it's a lot easier to explain that. What is the mix as far as women competing for points and those just there for the casual and social aspect? I would say it's a pretty good blend of both at all times. And one of the things that I think is really particularly great about the Bells, and this is something Tracy Lindberg, who runs our local Bells group, is always emphasizing at the beginning of any tournament, is that we're all here to learn. We're all here to help each other, and it's about getting better, not just competing. So it's encouraged before you start a game. Anyone who knows anything about it will do their best to get everyone else up to speed on the things they need to know about it. Which especially, you know, when you're playing at different venues all the time, as opposed to one fixed venue, you end up seeing a lot of different games that people may have never played. And so it's really great to have that sense of helping each other achieve more rather than just purely competing. We're very helpful with each other as far as the rules go. In fact, I can think of one time at the last competition, I was in the middle of my ball on NASCAR, and there was a Gottlieb Vegas next to us, and someone was asking how to play. And I basically, in the middle of my ball, said, it's that loop. You want to keep repeating that loop. And Tracy's like, concentrate on your ball. Shut up. So, but I'm kind of a rules studier. I'll research the rules. Anytime we have a new venue, I'll look at the games list and see if Bowen Kearns has done any videos on those games. I think I've watched all of his tutorials pretty closely. So I do tend to be able to break down that into here's one or two things I think I can do the next time I play that game. So, Olivia, I know you like the competitions. In fact, if I look at the women's standings, you're top 15 in the women's, so that means you might get a chance to go to the women's national, which is a pretty big deal. I know Tracy's been there. Is that a goal of yours? That is a goal of mine this year. I mean, it really wasn't when I started playing. I just kind of got into it as a social thing, and Katie and I went to our first Bells tournament about a year and a half ago and took first and second place, which really surprised us. Wow. I ended up taking first place in the next two as well which surprised me quite a bit And that really kind of jump me into competing a lot more often and in more of the open events I just had a lot of fun with it getting better working on skills And it's kind of become this sort of maybe I'll go do this as a social thing to see, well, maybe I should see how far I can take this. So that was one of my goals for this year. I've definitely been doing a little better in women's events than open events. I'm trying to break into the top 1,000 on the overall rankings. I'm around 1,400 now, so I have a bit of a hill to climb. I need to win some things, kind of where I'm at. But it's been great fun, gives me a goal to drive for. Do either of you go to any shows or any pinball events? We get to some. Obviously, the big one here in the Valley is ZapCon, and we definitely are big players in that.

6:28

I think, what, last year we brought 12, 13 games to that, Olivia? Yeah, that sounds right. Sorry to interrupt. When is ZapCon? ZapCon tends to be end of April, beginning of May. The date fluctuates a little bit based on the convention center schedule. But yeah, it's in the Mesa Convention Center late spring. Yeah, they'll usually be about 100 pinball machines, 150 or so arcade games. We've got tournaments, women's tournament, open tournament, classics. Pretty well attended. Yeah, I'm just making a little calendar note here. I'm doing this little pinball profile world tour thing right now where I'm in 10 different cities and four different countries. But ZapCon Arizona, early spring. I might be able to check out a Diamondbacks game while I'm there. This is sounding pretty good for my chances to get out there in the April, May time zone. Let's see. ZapCon. Okay. For the bells and chimes, there are different chapters all over. But I know you've got some people that actually make quite the commute to get there. Well, we do, at least with our local. We have some people that come up from Tucson. I think we've had some come down from Flagstaff. But I think we've had a couple. Olivia, you probably can remember the details from a bit farther. Yeah, I mean, we'll certainly have people who used to be in the Phoenix area or have other connections to people in the Phoenix area happen to be in town at the same time. While I'd say the bulk is from the Phoenix area, even sometimes that can be a commute. I mean, we've traveled 60 to 70 miles to get to events that are essentially in our same major metropolitan area. Phoenix is very spread out from one end to the other. And Scottsdale and everything else, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like going from Chandler to Peoria, you know, it could be an hour-long drive. How often does the Bells and Chimes chapter meet? So Bells has events every month. So we have a 10-event regular season, and then we'll have two events that are usually in the months that we have off. So we typically have one every month here, and then they're scored in groups of two. So each is a two-event series, and then we have the overall 10 for sort of a player of the year at the end, based on the finishes throughout the year. But then in July, we usually have, we had our event in Tucson, which wasn't considered a league event, just to try and maybe jumpstart some interest in a Tucson chapter. And in November or December, we will do a non-league event that will be a fundraiser for Project Pinball. Last year, we did a three-strike knockout, but you could buy a fourth strike with an additional donation, which everyone did. So it was a four-strike knockout, and raised a good amount of money for Project Pinball as well. I like that a lot. I've noticed in the leagues that I'm in, and just in competitions in general, People are fascinated by the nostalgia of it if they haven't seen pinball in a while and they love the fact that there's a league. They love that it's social. There's some competition. There's the IFPA. There's all of these things. And you see people just kind of jump in with both feet. I imagine there are many women that have now taken this from a social once a month event to now, oh, I'm going to get my own machine or machines and then just grow and grow and grow. Is that what it's like there? Because it sounds like Phoenix is a real hotbed. I know when I was talking to Tracy before, the number of people in the league there, it's not too many, but it's just these hosts can't accommodate everybody. Is that what it's like with Bells and Chimes as well? Well, I mean, just our main league, Tilt Studio, had our first season last week, and we had 68 people show up. Kind of maxed out the available machines. That's definitely a consideration. We've actually just rearranged our home arcade to get people in and out of the machines more quickly because it is a pretty crowded space. we'll have between 16 and 32 at a Bells event. So you do have to have a pretty good-sized collection. And we do have our players that started getting one or two machines and things like that, and you can kind of see where maybe a couple years down the road there might be some more home venues with 5, 6, 7, 8. They do tend to multiply. We picked up our first machine two years ago. We've been restoring arcade video games for some time and felt like the arcade should have some pinball noises in it. And then from about four or five months after that, we're starting to go to Bell's, and now we have 16. Yeah, that was a big deal for me. We had 30-some video games in our collection, and we'd go to other places that had a mix of the two, and I just kept telling Olivia, I'm like, there's something missing. You know, without hearing those pens mixed in and seeing them, it just feels off. And so we finally, you mentioned jumping in with both feet. You know, we went from zero pinballs to eight in about, what, four months?

13:14

It was someone's coffee table. Yeah, they had ripped the head off and the neck. The legs were gone. The internals were just in terrible condition. The cabinet was in terrible condition. The play field was badly damaged. Were the three spinners even on the game? The three spinners were there, but pretty well seized up. But yeah, we ended up getting that restored back to a beautiful working game. And after that, we were like, all right, we got this. We can do anything now. So it was just a progression from having some general skills in some woodworking and electronics to really learning through trial and error and through resources. One of the things that a lot of people aren't aware of with arcade video games and pinball machines, And when these were first made, detailed specs came with them that laid out all the circuits, all the wiring, all the part numbers for everything, because it was intended for the people that bought them to maintain them themselves. So here we are 40 years later in a lot of cases, and there's just this vast amount of information out there that you don't get with most electronics. And that is a huge resource. The internet has enabled people to take those and compile what they've learned about them and troubleshooting guides and all this kind of stuff. So that really was kind of the shoulders we stood on to be able to learn how to do this. And then it was trial and error, and eventually we started getting it right. Did this lead into your creation of the rethemed Disney's Black Hole Pinball Machine? 100% it did. The award-winning Black Hole Machine, I should say, because you won at ZapCon, didn't you? Yeah, yeah. We actually, I believe we went in two categories and we had to pick one. So we went with the fan favorite. We thought that sounded good. Darn right. Yeah, that was a huge labor of love. That was a big nostalgia project for me mostly. I had seen The Black Hole when I was younger and it had really, you know, Maximilian and that red eye. It scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. Exactly. I was like, are we going to bed? Like, am I going to make it to the morning or are we going to be swallowed by a black hole? Right. So as a kid, it really left a mark. And when we had done Blackout, we had gained the confidence to think maybe we could do this. Maybe we could do a re-theme. Ultimately, we want to do a pure custom, but we thought, let's start with a re-theme. Someone's already figured out the geometry of the play field and made sure that these shots are going to work and all that kind of stuff. So let's just keep an eye out for a project. And we had a Williams Phoenix fall in our lap. much similar condition to the blackout, in fact, that we had gotten before. Oh, a lot worse even? Yeah. Cabinet was in terrible shape. The play field was badly damaged. And we kind of felt like, all right, this one's probably beyond saving, at least without a phenomenal amount of effort for an average game. So we said, this is our candidate. We just kind of took what we had learned from working on blackout and some of the other pins in between and started looking at the movie to break down kind of how we wanted to approach it. And it was a really interesting project as we worked through it, because we both agree that if either one of us had tried to do this alone, it would have been nothing like the game we came up with. You know, I had the hardware side and the kind of the spatial thinking to put the thing together and to get it to work the way we wanted to. I did a lot of the artwork and some of the electronics work and she definitely, Olivia helped a lot with the electronics stuff but where she really shined was coming up with the rules You wanna talk about that that Olivia Yeah so we have the Phoenix play field that has some lanes up top a spinner, some 10-drop targets, and a little standing target on the left. So pretty simple layout. One of the things we did is we took that standing target that's on the left side of the play field in Phoenix and replaced it with a scoop, and that lets us hold the ball and do something. Sorry, you had a scoop there. So you drilled a scoop in? Yeah, so we cut out a little square, mounted a scoop on the bottom. We actually had to slightly adjust one of the rails that holds the plate sealed up because it wasn't designed for that. So it was a little bigger piece of hardware than was there before, but we got that to fit. And so now we can catch the ball and do something. You are so brave. Yeah, it was the scariest part of that project for me, was drilling that hole and then cutting out that square. That was a no-going-back moment. Yeah, no kidding. And yeah, that was probably the scariest thing we did in the whole project, because we couldn't undo it. That sort of let us stop the ball and convey some information to the player. So we have some modes. We've got six different modes based on events in the movies that cause you to play different parts of the play field, as long as it's sort of a wizard mode at the end where you can build a large jackpot, hit the scoop, and choose whether or not to continue building, risking what you've built up or take what you've built and take the points. So it kind of let us put a lot of complexity into an otherwise pretty simple play field. We have modes where you have to get a certain number of pops in a certain amount of time or complete the lanes quickly or hit a sequence of shots or chase a lit drop target, that kind of stuff. So how, Olivia, do you relay the information from the modes since that's not a DMD game? It is now. It's actually we put an LCD screen in. Wow. So it's an LCD game now. We were highly inspired by Total Nuclear Annihilation. That was, in a lot of ways, kind of the benchmark we were holding ourselves to. We wanted something that had that kind of old world feel, but at the same time felt new and fresh. And so a couple of things, you know, we decided right from the get-go we're going to be a big part of it. And, you know, the one was the scoop so that we could have mode play. But the other was the inclusion of an LCD. That alone probably ended up doubling or tripling the complexity of the project, adding an LCD, because now we had to come up with a UI and we had to figure out how to integrate. You know, we have video clips from the movie that play. We have little things that pop up on the screen and pop off as events occur. And that's probably the one part of it that we still have a lot of refinement we need to really put in is the UI and the kind of sound call outs for the game. Because trying to marry the older style play field with the newer style of modern interface for a game just really adds a lot of work. And you have a lot more sympathy, I guess, let's say, for the sterns of the world. when you hear all the issues that may or may not occur in their games when they're released. It's like, oh, yeah, the UI stuff's hard. Well, here's what's amazing. You said you wanted to do something simple. We're just going to do a re-theme as opposed to a brand-new pin. You made a brand-new pin. You put an LCD in a scoop. With the exception of the play field wood itself, pretty much. We did new plastic, new art. We had a back glass design printed. We stopped to do the cabinet art that's kind of on our checklist still. But yeah, I mean, it's essentially a new game on an old play field. I'm very impressed. You'll be able to see some of these pictures on our Facebook page for Pinball Profile. That's pretty impressive. I mean, the bells and chimes, the outpost Codelia, Black Hole, and now even something bigger with ZapCon. Do you want to tell us what's going on with ZapCon? Yeah, so the previous coordinators of ZapCon have been running the show fantastically for about seven years. It's been a big success. It's something everyone here in the Valley looks forward to, but they've got other things they want to do with their lives. And starting this year, myself and Olivia and a friend of ours, Paul Santa Cruz, are going to be taking over the reins of heading up ZapCon next year. That is amazing. You know what? I'm so impressed, and Tracy knows this too, from when I talked to her at Pinberg. People who step up like yourself can take on these big things to give pleasure to so many other people. You've got a lot on your hands, but I know with your experience, ZapCon's going to be bigger and better. This is very exciting. You know, it's one of those things we felt like was a really important thing to our community, and we want to make sure that keeps going. We'll be able to find all that information on Facebook? Yep, it's on the Facebook ZapCon page. The dates, the times, it will all be published as it gets locked in. And it'll also be on ZapCon.com. I've really enjoyed talking to both you, Olivia and Katie, and I think it's amazing what you're doing in Arizona. I'm impressed with the repairs. I'm dying to see this black hole game, so I think I've got to come to ZapCon just to see that alone. All the best success to both of you. Thank you so much. Thanks. It was great talking to you today. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find our group on Facebook. We're also on Twitter at Pinball Profile. Email us pinballprofile at gmail.com and please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher. I'm Jeff Teolis.