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Martin Ayub of Pinball News

Pintastic New England·video·55m 43s·analyzed·Jan 26, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Steven Martin recounts 21 years of Pinball News founding and editorial philosophy.

Summary

Steven Martin of Pinball News discusses the founding and 21-year history of his independent pinball media outlet, tracing his journey from casual photographer at pinball shows to trusted industry journalist. He reflects on the pivotal 1999 Williams factory closure that inspired him to launch Pinball News, emphasizing the importance of factual, verified reporting over speculation. Martin details his editorial philosophy, relationship with manufacturers under NDA, and challenges covering sensitive stories like the Predator licensing debacle.

Key Claims

  • Pinball News was founded at the end of 1999/early 2000 in direct response to Williams' factory closure following the 1999 Pinball Expo

    high confidence · Steven Martin, explaining the catalyst for starting Pinball News after George Gomez's cautionary talk at Pinball Expo 99 and the subsequent closure of Williams' shop

  • The 1999 Pinball Expo featured a surprise networked tournament system with 10 connected Star Wars Episode I machines and photo ID badge scanning, built in just three days

    high confidence · Steven Martin describing the Williams tournament innovation at Pinball Expo 99

  • George Gomez warned at Pinball Expo 99 that the Pinball 2000 platform would not reach its full potential despite optimistic industry sentiment

    high confidence · Steven Martin quoting Gomez saying 'my spider sense is tingling' during his talk about concerns over the platform's future

  • An anonymous group provided Steven Martin with evidence and transcripts of recordings with Fox lawyers indicating no valid license was granted for the Predator pinball game

    high confidence · Steven Martin discussing the Predator debacle and how he verified the licensing issue before publishing

  • Stern Pinball broke the historical industry jinx that prevented manufacturers from rereleasing existing titles, enabling reruns and re-themes like Striker Extreme

    high confidence · Steven Martin and interviewer discussing Stern's ability to produce small runs and rerelease games, enabled by home sales demand

  • Pinball News operates under non-disclosure agreements with multiple manufacturers including Stern, American Pinball, and others to publish coordinated announcements

    high confidence · Steven Martin noting his trusted relationship with manufacturers and collaborative article preparation under NDA

  • Steven Martin intentionally publishes Pinball News without a fixed schedule to ensure quality over timeliness

    high confidence · Martin explaining his rejection of daily or weekly publication commitments in favor of releasing stories when ready

Notable Quotes

  • “Well, pinball's not dead. Even if Williams are out of the game, Sega had just become Stern, so Stern was still there. But beyond that, everybody who has a game still has their game and it still works.”

    Steven Martin@ 11:33 — Core philosophical statement explaining why he founded Pinball News despite industry pessimism after Williams' closure

  • “My spider sense is tingling.”

    George Gomez@ 11:09 — Gomez's famous warning about the Pinball 2000 platform's uncertain future that preceded Williams' factory closure

  • “If you read something in Pinball News as far as I'm concerned it's totally verified and true.”

    Steven Martin@ 19:51 — Core editorial principle establishing Pinball News' credibility and distinction from rumor-based forums

  • “It's a relatively small business, and if you break that trust, I don't think you'll ever recover from it.”

    Steven Martin@ 21:57 — Emphasizes the importance of trustworthiness in the tight-knit pinball industry

  • “If you're going to bring out a pinball and it's got terrible code on it, it's almost doomed from day one.”

    Steven Martin@ 14:31 — Parallels his quality-first approach to publishing with industry product standards

  • “The whole idea of starting off Pinball News was to support people who were supporting Pinball.”

    Steven Martin@ 17:07 — Articulates the mission behind Pinball News beyond pure journalism

Entities

Steven MartinpersonPinball NewsorganizationGeorge GomezpersonWilliams PinballcompanyStern PinballcompanyJersey Jack PinballcompanyPinball Expo 99event

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern Pinball broke historical industry practice of one-run-only production by enabling small-run rereleases and re-themes like Striker Extreme

    high · Steven Martin discussing how small production volumes (500-1000 units vs 5000) allowed Stern to reorder parts at known costs and rerun/re-theme games without massive upfront investment

  • ?

    business_signal: Williams Pinball factory closure after 1999 Pinball Expo despite positive industry sentiment about Pinball 2000 platform

    high · Steven Martin: 'later in the year they brought out Star Wars Episode 1...everybody was very upbeat and then we went to this seminar with George Gomez...and then after that the show closed on Sunday flew back home Monday morning Williams' shop closed.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball News operates under manufacturer NDAs to coordinate article releases with official announcements, balancing exclusive access with editorial independence

    high · Steven Martin: 'both you and I were under NDA with American Pinball...to work on Pin Game Journal for me and Pinball News for you...they trust that you will hold it back.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball News maintains contributor network including Mick Bob Brown covering Southern U.S. shows (Chicago, Memphis, Georgia areas)

    medium · Steven Martin: 'Mick Bob Brown's been very productive and generous with his reporting of shows, firstly in Chicago area and locations and more recently down in Memphis and Georgia areas as well.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Post-1999 Williams closure, industry pessimism was widespread despite remaining manufacturers, distributors, parts suppliers, and shows

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.167

0:00
And welcome back, same people who were here just a minute ago. So I've been trying to get Martin to come out here for so many times. It's true. Derek, if you brought up the pinballnews.com front page and his posting of his trip to the United States, sort of the same timing story of we're not lined up with other shows, whether we're doing our usual June dates or this November date, if you had been able to come without any travel restrictions you still would have been in the country too long to be here probably, yeah so we're lucky that the restrictions actually worked in our favour this time absolutely, and in my favour I think as well as it turned out because it's been a great trip so I started off in Houston at the Arcade Expo there over to IAFA as we spoke about earlier for those of you who were here and ending the trip here at Pintastic. And it's great to finally make it. Mm-hmm. And here in New England, the states are real tiny, so we've been making reference to different towns and cities that everybody knows what state they're in, but they might not be in Massachusetts. Yeah, I've been to the area a few times in the past.
1:48
This is before pinball shows. Right. This was as a tourist, you know, visiting like Portland and Boston and going to see some Red Sox games and all that kind of thing.
1:58
And crossing over the border into Canada and Toronto and seeing the Blue Jays. Oh, baseball fan. Oh, yeah. Well, that's what got me into baseball, actually. It was, if you've got time for a little funny story, which was my friend and I were going to a comedy club. We'd been in Boston and we were going to a comedy club in downtown. and so we went there and the compere was sort of picking out people who were in the audience who he knew and there were some Red Sox players there and he was going, hey, what are you guys doing here? Aren't you meant to be in Atlanta playing there? And the Red Sox guy said, no, there's a problem with the stadium there. There are tiles falling off the ceiling. So they cancelled that and moved everything back to Fenway. So he said, it's all free seating, just turn up tomorrow, buy a ticket, it wherever you like. So great, okay, sounds like a great plan. So that's what we did. In fact, we went there twice and saw someone play that game. Then we saw a doubleheader as well a couple of days later. And then when we were travelling up and went to Toronto, that's when Toronto were playing Boston again, playing the Red Sox. So we got to see them up there as well. So after not being into baseball at all, just go into Fenway Park as a tribute to them. We were sitting there behind the mound, well, no, behind the bat, the, what do they call it, the guy who catches the ball. The catcher. Yeah, behind him. Anyway, behind the net. And you can see I'm a fan. And we're sort of talking to each other and saying, okay, I don't really understand what's going on here, why are they doing that? And then, because it's so friendly, people just turn around and go, oh, what's happening here is that guy there is going to run over there and he's going to throw the ball to them. And so by the end of it, we kind of felt like we knew how to play baseball. And it was very friendly and totally different to any sort of like football games, English football, soccer games we might have been to in the UK. We'd all been a little more aggressive, a little more fan-based, very much more in support of your team and against the opposition. Whereas here it was like a family affair. It was almost like picnic. People were sitting there with their beers and their hot dogs and their popcorn.

  • The pinball industry's small size means breaking trust with manufacturers is essentially unrecoverable

    medium confidence · Steven Martin cautioning about the importance of trustworthiness in a tight-knit business ecosystem

  • “You say if he's doing that and they're doing that and they've got this license for that and they're bringing out this game, then it's got to be all those things connected. And that becomes accepted fact at that point.”

    Steven Martin@ 23:38 — Describes the problem of speculation becoming accepted fact in online forums like Pinside

  • “Stern comes along in a very sad time for the industry, and with no competition, they could try this idea. Let's make more. Let's take orders after we thought we were done.”

    Steven Martin/Interviewer@ 31:49 — Explains how Stern's lack of competition enabled business innovation in small production runs and rereleases

    • Pinball 2000
    product
    Star Wars Episode Igame
    Predatorgame
    Wizard of Ozgame
    Striker Extremegame
    American Pinballcompany
    Mick Bob Brownperson
    Roger Sharpeperson
    Jimperson
    Pedretti Gamingcompany
    Team Pinballcompany
    Fast Pinballcompany
    Funhouse Rudy's Revengegame
    rec.games.pinballorganization
    Pinsideorganization
    Pintastic New Englandevent

    medium · Steven Martin: 'after that everyone was saying, oh, that's it then, pinball's dead. And I was still buzzing...pinball's not dead. Even if Williams are out of the game, Sega had just become Stern...everyone who has a game still has their game and it still works.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Online pinball forums like rec.games.pinball and Pinside enable crowdsourced speculation about unreleased games but often produce false consensus from speculation

    medium · Steven Martin discussing how forum users connect clues: 'you say if he's doing that and they're doing that and they've got this license for that...it's got to be all those things connected. And that becomes accepted fact at that point.'

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinball Expo 99 featured surprise networked tournament system with photo ID badge scanning across 10 connected Star Wars Episode I machines, built in 3 days

    high · Steven Martin's detailed account of the tournament's technical implementation: 'they put you on the high score table. You could see your scores, and there were 10 connected Star Wars Episode I machines there.'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Predator pinball licensing scandal: anonymous group provided evidence that Fox did not grant valid license to Kevin Kulaak and Skip B

    high · Steven Martin: 'they had proof that there was no licence given by Fox...they had transcripts of recordings with...Fox's lawyers that indicated that there was no evidence that they actually didn't have it.'

  • ?

    announcement: Funhouse Rudy's Revenge pinball announced at recent show with coordinated media coverage involving Pedretti Gaming, Team Pinball, and Fast Pinball

    high · Steven Martin: 'the Funhouse Rudy's Revenge, which was just announced this weekend...I work with Pedretti Gaming, and I work with Team Pinball, and Fast Pinball as well, in order to get the article done.'

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball manufacturers use code names and deliberate red herrings in communications to obfuscate unreleased game information from speculation forums

    medium · Steven Martin: 'Stern has a program of putting out red herrings just to throw that off. It's information warfare.'

    • 4:16
    It's just a real change and a real nice way to spend some time. So that got me into following baseball a little bit and being a Sox fan.
    4:24
    And I think the main thing we want to talk about is the 21st century. But we need to position that uh where were you or what was your frame of mind when you said i'm going to do more than just follow pinball for myself i'm going to be a publisher what what happened well i suppose i can uh i can put that down to the events of 1999 because before that i had been um publishing pictures on my own personal website from various pinball shows I've been to. I came to Pinball Expo in 1990 and again in I think it was 94.
    5:10
    But I didn't... This is the earlier days of the internet where if you had an account with an internet service provider, you'd get a little bit of web space. You might get 10 megs, 20 megs, something like that of space. You can do a web page if you know how.
    5:24
    And then it was www.internetprovider.com slash your username. So no one's going to find it by accident, and Google wasn't really up and running by that stage either. So it was only the people you shared any of this to that they'd know it was there. But I went to various shows in the UK, and we had the Pimple Owners Association there, and they held an annual convention. And I'd go there sometimes, and I'd take some machines sometimes, and I'd take a few pictures. And this was back in the days before digital photography. so you take the pictures you get back home, you take the film out you send it off to get it processed you get it printed and the prints will come back and then you scan them in and then you put them online and this is a week later so for people who hadn't gone it's all new those who had gone, it's old news so after that the introduction of digital photography and that speeded things up a lot more but I was still just putting stuff on my own web space and then 99 came along and I went to Pinball Expo and I was there in the audience for that notorious George Gomez talk where it was such a strange show because we'd been on the factory tour of Williams we'd seen them making Star Wars Episode 1 this was the one and only factory tour in the Gurney plant all of previous Williams tours had been in the 3401 North California plant that's right and they were making video games as well then in the same factory and it was all new and shiny and it looked great and everybody was very upbeat about the new Pinball 2000 platform. I'd actually been in London at the beginning of the year at the ATEI shows it was then where Williams had launched Pinball 2000. That's where you first got to see Revenge from Mars.
    7:14
    So anyway, later in the year they brought out Star Wars Episode 1 and okay, it wasn't a game for everyone, it was more a kids type game but everyone was very upbeat and then we went to this seminar with george gomez talking about it and he basically said well we have well i've got you know big misgivings and fears that we're not going to get to see the best from this platform and everyone's going well is that just george being you know george um but then after that the show closed on sunday flew back home monday morning Williams' shop. What?
    7:54
    Well, so to flesh that out a little, there had been since 1996, I would say, since Capcom pinball had kind of closed down so there was a sense of pinball is shrinking down and we'll come back and say this is from a peak, say in 1992 or so that had gotten Capcom interested in jumping into pinball at all. So there was a sense, even at Pinball Expo 98, I think that Williams is going to do this thing, this sort of secret project that only certain people had any real idea what they were doing. And They were doing that out of some kind of desperation or something bad was happening to pinball. There was not like video games stomping on pinball. It's like pinball losing momentum in some way. Some people could hear George Gomez at Expo 99 and say, well, he's being cautious, like covering himself in case some expectations aren't met. And there was some key number for Star Wars Episode I, I believe, that was met. What they said, well, we have to do this for Star Wars Episode I to say that Pinball 2000 is on its way. That's what they said and it happened. And yet that Black Monday happened. Yeah, but there was so much buzz, positive excitement about Pinball 2000. They had the tournament there, and William's team had built up this amazing tournament system. Yeah, a complete surprise. Like, in a few days, working all night long, they came up with something that your special badge, you were given a photo ID with your number at Expo. Nobody was told in advance this was going to happen. at Expo 99, and so you got your special badge, you had your photo, and surprise, when you looked at the high score table, your photo would be in the high score table if you had one of the high scores. Yeah, I think there was a barcode on the ID, and basically you walked up to the machine and just swiped it. You could scan it when you started a game. Yeah, and it knew who you were. It knew whether you had any games left to play and how many games you had left to play, because everybody was allowed a certain number of entries. And yeah, and they put you on the high score table. You could see your scores, and there were 10 connected Star Wars Episode I machines there. And they put all this work into it and it was fantastic and everybody was saying this is a thing which can be used in future years and then, no, it all got there. Yeah, and that was part of Gomez's talk too. It's like the first part is, see, we connected these up. It just took us like three man weeks compressed into three days to make this networked system that you guys had no idea we were going to do because there's so much off-the-shelf stuff to build on. And then he said, my spider sense is tingling. And the mood changed. That's right. Well, having gone through all that and come back and seen this news, everybody was saying, oh, that's it then, pinball's dead.
    11:26
    And I was still buzzing. I was still full of excitement and enthusiasm for it. And I thought, no, pinball's not dead. even if Williams are out of the game Sega had just become Stern so Stern was still there but beyond that everybody who has a game still has their game and it still works and all the pinball shows which were taking place they're still happening and Stern are going to be bringing out new games there are still parts for sale there's still meetings and collectors and new buyers for games still people getting into the business. And RGP. Yeah, and RGP, yeah.
    12:08
    So what can I do to kind of reinforce this view, not just to collectors, but if any operators who are looking and think, oh, Pinball's dead then. But no, there's still this huge hunger out there amongst the people who are here for Pinball. And it needs to be satisfied. So how can I do that? So I thought, well, I'll set up Pinball News. I'll turn my little bit of web space into something a bit more formal. So that's when pinballnews.co.uk started.
    12:42
    Soon after that, it became obvious that most of the visitors to it were not from the UK. So I got the .com domain and ran it alongside. So I got both. And that was really the start of it. So I wanted to show all the shows that are going on, all the new games that are coming out, new products that are being launched for pinball.
    13:06
    I wanted to provide some information, some educational value as well to it, and a diary of events that are coming up. And that's basically what it was when it started in 1999, at the end of 1999 into 2000. And that's kind of what it does now. yeah and uh i i see that you've adapted over time so now um you never did have a commitment of like being a daily a weekly or any particular periodicity is like whenever the news came out yeah and yeah i found it was um having tried to do similar kind of things in the past in in other areas I know that it if you put a timeline against it and say on this day you got to publish something then you won produce your best product It kind of like what Ryan was saying earlier about Chicago Gaming when they release their game, they release it when it's ready, when they've done everything they want to do with it. Now if I have to rush out an article about this show and it has to be out by today, I'm going to struggle because I'm busy here and I've got a lot of pictures yet I want to add to it, and I wouldn't be able to do that. Now, the nature of the Internet, of course, means that you can update it afterwards, but it's never quite the same, is it? It's the initial splash, it's the initial release. It's like releasing a pinball. If you bring out a pinball and it's got terrible code on it, it's almost doomed from day one. So you want to bring out something which is a good product. So, no, I'd much rather just bring out stories as and when they're ready. and that's it's a good middle ground like I've worked some with Scott Tisma on Silver Ball News and Views which he was so insistent on totally polishing everything the first version of that chart was published in Silver Ball News and Views but it would be like a months long gestation period and he was very conscious about copyright. We're going to fix this in a tangible form, as copyright law officially requires here in this country. So he was like over-maturing the product and not capturing the ability to capture the little instantaneous day-to-day changes. It would be too reactive to it. Yeah, and then the other side, of course, is whatever news value you're able to extract from rec.games.pinball and later Pinside.
    15:48
    It's an interesting point that you make about copyright, because initially I was very defensive about the content that was on Pinball News. I thought, OK, I've spent a lot of time and effort. I've flown 4,000 miles to Pinball Expo to take these pictures, paid for my hotel room, paid for the car, paid for everything, and flown back and got them all processed, spent the time, and then I put them on the website, and five minutes later, somebody's pasted a whole bunch of them on Pinzider. It's like, well, thanks. But over time, I've become a lot more mellow to that and thought, hey, you know, if you want to take the pictures, fine. It would be nice if you could just give me a bit of credit for it and say it was on Pinball News, but other than that, knock yourself out. So it's quite funny actually. You load up Facebook every now and again and just scrolling through your timeline and all of a sudden you come to a picture and you go, oh, I took that. And then...
    16:42
    But also, you know, you can come to deals, content sharing, you know, like the Ping Game Journal that came out at Expo for Legends of Valhalla. There's a picture in there that I took of the team and Jim said, can I use that picture? I said, yeah, sure.
    17:03
    And then he was at the show and I wasn't, so he took some pictures for me. The whole idea of starting off Pimple News was to support people who were supporting Pimple.
    17:15
    So publications, sellers, distributors, manufacturers, show organisers, all that kind of stuff. Give them extra publicity and show what's still going on in the pinball world. Now, if people didn't come to this show this year, hopefully they'll look at the review and report and look at the video that's just gone up online about two minutes ago. And, yeah, it's about a 21-minute video walk around the show, which I did this morning during Kevin's seminar. So apologies to Kevin for not being here for that.
    17:50
    They will hopefully look at that and go, oh wow, I missed a fantastic show. I need to be there next year.
    17:57
    Well, it worked with you. You saw stuff from other media about what we're doing and we fed you an article one time. Yeah, I got a report from here in 2017, I think.
    18:09
    So it just helps everyone. Why wouldn't we do it? Yeah, and another point that you sort of meshed into all those other things you were saying about your current attitude, you still have that special thing that you're trusted by multiple manufacturers. We can now say that both you and I were under NDA with American Pinball over there to work on Pin Game Journal for me and Pinball News for you. I certainly suspected that you were doing something that was going to come out the day that you were allowed to put it out.
    18:54
    And we've done that with Stern. So it's like you're a known trusted quantity. And you can have an article ready to go, but they trust that you will hold it back. I like to think so, but not because I'm going to be sycophantic towards them in any way. I'm still going to be independent, but it needs to be factual. And that's one of the key things. I mentioned the other supporting people in pinball. This is, as you said earlier, back in the days of rec games pinball and before Pinside. And there was a lot of information out there about what was going on in the pinball world. But there was a lot of fake news as well. There was a lot of rumour, a lot of speculation, a lot of which was just not true. and I thought it was also very important to be able to bring people factual information which is verified and is true. Now if you read something in Pinball News as far as I'm concerned it's totally verified and true.
    19:58
    We don't really do much in the way of comment on there but there is a little comment section for some more personal and maybe more subjective takes on a few issues but they are in a little comment section. everything else is as objective and as factual as possible and I think that leads back to the trust issue because if people know that you're not going to denigrate their product in your first report you're actually going to present it in a factual way and also that you can be trusted to get this information days, weeks, months in advance of an actual publication or release an announcement of it, prepare an article, and they know it's going to be a good article. I mean, just an example of that, a great example of that, is the Funhouse Rudy's Revenge, which was just announced this weekend. It's an article on the website about that at the moment. But I work with Pedretti Gaming, and I work with Team Pinball, and Fast Pinball as well, in order to get the article done, get the media, the movies, the animations, the pictures, and the details of who's involved and everything about it, and agree with them what we're going to say and what we're going to hold back for a follow-up article.
    21:20
    They're happy with that. I'm happy with it. We get the information they want out there now. And it's a trust issue, and manufacturers understand this. And it goes back to the days of Pingame Journal and Jim being able to go around, and Roger Sharp, of course, also being able to, when he was doing his books, be able to go around various manufacturers, get the information they need, and be able to see parts of the factory that they're not going to report on or spread rumour or information about to other people.
    21:57
    It's a relatively small business, and if you break that trust, I don't think you'll ever recover from it. Or you'll call yourself the K-word.
    22:10
    As, by profession, I'm an information architect, and I can say that something like a discussion forum, like rec.games.pinball, is designed, to the extent there's any sense of design behind it, it is a design that will do well at having people contribute their little clues. So if we talk about what is the next Chicago gaming release going to be, an original title or something like that, and someone will say, well, I heard this, and someone else will say, I heard that. And that is something that works in the forum structure of something like rec.games.pinball. If you want to know as much as the world outside the NDA circle knows, you can just go through this thread and see all the clues pile up and people will shoot down other people's clues but it's a bunch of people who are not allowed to say inside the circle not saying anything and there's a bunch of people who don't know much about what's going on outside the circle putting together what they can that's what those type of online sites can do. Sure, but it can also lead to a lot of speculation which is you can add two and two together and still get five. You say if he's doing that and they're doing that and they've got this license for that and they're bringing out this game then, it's got to be all those things connected, that's what's coming out. And that becomes accepted fact at that point. Now we know that Stern has a program of putting out red herrings just to throw that off.
    24:00
    Yeah. It's information warfare. Yeah. And code names, of course, for games as well. Right, and the code names. Yeah. So we have pinball news then is kind of the antidote to that, that you said you wanted the journalistic standards. Yeah, cut through all the noise, really, and try and find out what the actual details are. Even if it's not as exciting as the rumour and speculation. if the actual truth is well actually no they're not going to be making that game or they're not going to be bringing out anything until you know until March next year then say that yeah do you have any particular recollections of some challenging stories of things that you bet yeah well well there's been a good few I mean probably the biggest one was the Predator debacle where I was contacted by an anonymous group who said that they had proof that there was no licence given by a 21st century, or 20th century Fox, as it was then, for the Predator licence for Kevin Kulak and Skip B to actually make this game. And they had transcripts of recordings with, or phone calls with Fox's lawyers that indicated that there was no evidence that they actually didn't have it. And that's what actually ended up bringing down... Well, the project was never going to happen, but it had to be worked through. It had to go through the process of verifying all this stuff in order to get the article correct and accurate.
    25:47
    And it's an unpleasant one, really, because you have to say, I'm sorry, guys, all you people who paid your money into this, you've probably lost it you've bought something which doesn't exist and is probably never going to exist and so that's nobody likes to be the purveyor of bad news but worse than that you also get some kickback on that and people said well if I'd known you were going to run this story I wouldn't have paid my money for the game three weeks ago and I was like well I'm sorry I didn't know you were going to be paying the money for the game three weeks ago It's a lose-lose in that way, but that's a story which had to happen.
    26:31
    But there are some stories which I can't actually do anything with, which are probably the most difficult ones, where you've got information that you can't use. Not because it's not valid or interesting, but because publishing it would probably be detrimental overall to Pinball and would involve a lot of trust. And there's a story about that at the moment which I can't go into.
    27:02
    Yeah, I won't say any more about it. But, yes, there are plenty of difficult stories. They're not all great. And reporting on failures is the hardest thing. Reporting on successes is great. but it's kind of like you see the press releases from the pinball companies hey we've hired this guy we've hired her we've hired them you never get the press releases that say this person's left that person's gone you know yeah so you kind of have to join the dots there like the lime and sheets question that hung over that's right nobody seemed willing to say it oh by the way he's not working for Stern anymore But I mentioned it in an article and all of a sudden hey this guy saying that DIMER not working there anymore I thought doesn everybody know that Yeah he certainly brought it up to a higher level of verification so that proved something about the trustworthiness. Yes, that's positive. But overall, I'd say it's been a very, very positive experience doing 20, 21 years of pinball coverage through Pinball News and no signs of slowing down either. I think now we're back able to travel again.
    28:18
    And also I have to thank the great writers I have who travel the world as well and report from various shows. I can't be everywhere and it's never intended to be just my website. I want it to be the voice of many voices. Is there a territory? Are you actively hoping to find a reporter for any particular place? No, normally you do it on a case-by-case basis. If I couldn't have come here then maybe somebody else could have and they can do the report.
    28:51
    Mick Brown's been very productive and generous with his reporting of shows, firstly in Chicago area and locations and more recently down in Memphis and Georgia areas as well. So again to see, I mean those are areas I've never been to so great to see reports from the Southern Pride game room Show and the Grand Old Game Room Expo, those kind of events, which are fantastic. Again, it's good people putting on great shows and that news needs to be shared.
    29:29
    Well, since you mentioned a minute ago that you like the happy news, and pinball in the past 20 years has been more happy news than bad news, I think. Maybe we can You mentioned a couple of those things. So Stern, as I made a quick reference to last hour,
    29:53
    Stern did something that we just really needed in the coin-op business. They broke a jinx that said you can't do reruns because you have to have new product all the time.
    30:10
    And that was so important to their survival in the aughts. because they were able to capture the upside, meaning they found after having shipped that Lord of the Rings had more demand than they thought. Whereas in the 70s and 80s, that sales manager had to make one call of, we're making this many, and that was the one time, you set the one quantity, and if you lost out on sales, you could have had, well, too bad because you were not able to reintroduce the title, with a slight exception for Harley Davidson. We went on the tour at 3401 North California when they were making that little extra run of Harley Davidson after the initial run because there was so much money on the table that they had to take the orders for the, I think it was 200 extra, and they had a short line so they could be running the Williams title, the Bally title that were the regular production games, and also be doing this extra run of Holly Davidson. Other than that and the Stern Holly Davidson, it was Gottlieb sold so many of this drop target game and they had to rework it. They had to make it look new and different because you were done with that other title. You could never go back to it. That was the 70s and 80s. That's when I was operating. That's the world of new title all the time. Then Stern comes along in a very sad time for the industry, or for pinball anyway, and with no competition, They could try this idea. Let's make more. Let's take orders after we thought we were done. And also re-theme as well in some cases, like with Striker Extreme. Yeah. Build that as a soccer game. Stretch it out, make all those 19 NFL titles.
    32:16
    So they were able to extend the development costs. There's so much money into the software. That's got to be amortized across all the games. built. Yeah, and also I think the key difference then was because they were building such small quantities of games, it was no longer the case that when they went into production with a game like the Williams, they contact their parts suppliers and say, okay, we want 5,000 of these toys and 5,000 of those mechs. You could actually say, well, we're only going to build 1,000 or 500 of these, and then if you want to re-theme it, then you'll re-release it. You're probably only going to order another 500 again. So it's probably going to say, well, the same as we did last time. You know what the costs are going to be up front. It's not like, well, if you're ordering 5,000, then the cost is this, but if you're only ordering 500, then it's twice as much or three times as much. So they were into doing small runs, not out of choice, of course, just out of necessity because the market wasn't there anymore. But that did give them the agility to swap the line over and go back and, as you were saying, start rerunning existing titles. and I mean that's I suppose the big driver for that was the home sales which we can talk about separately if you want sure so to continue the thing about the reruns so Jersey Jack comes along as a real competitor and maybe the jinx was going to come back maybe it's going to be a case that the Stern releases of 2013, we're going to be one run and done. But no. I mean, Jersey Jack didn't have any reason to enforce the jinx. I mean, they were in a position where they certainly wanted to do reruns on Wizard of Oz. And then the other companies come along and they say, well, it seems the way things are. Nobody is really pushing that old model anymore. I think with Hot Wheels. You'd want to take more orders of Hot Wheels in the future, as long as you hold the license.
    34:33
    And as long as people are tuned in to Hot Wheels is the game I want, then it's good for everybody. I think licensing does play a part in that as well, and David will be able to comment about that later.
    34:48
    If you've got a three-year license to produce this game, and you've been producing it for 18 months and moved on to the next one. You've got 18 months before the license runs out. Are you going to go back and revisit it and make the most of that license? If you paid for it up front or you've already worked out the deal, maybe as it gets towards the end, the last six months, do another run. And then you can decide whether or not it's worth renewing it any longer, whether the demand is still there for that. So yeah, I think licensing does play a role in that. And of course, that wasn't such an issue for Williams at least when they were doing the one and done so sales to players and our famous chart of the industry now you were reading games.pinball in the 90s oh yeah my history was I got into pinball in 81 82 and 83 when I was a student. And I was really a video games guy. Sorry, that puts me on the other side of the fence. But I used to play video games, I used to play the classics, you know, the Frogger, the Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, all that kind of stuff, at college. And I used to write some video games as well on my home computer and sell them, just locally. Back in the days where you'd buy a cassette that would have like ten games you could download onto your computer put in there and it would load them up. So I did that. But they also had a couple of pinball machines in the Students' Union refectory there. And me being a poor, impoverished student, as most students are, or at least used to be, if you're not from a privileged background, I was paying money for video games and you could win extra lives and that kind of thing but you could never win a free game but pinball, you could get credits, you could not just win one if you could, you could win several free games so we kind of the group of us there kind of came to a an unconscious decision that you'd always leave the machine, the pinball machine with at least as many credits on it as when you arrived at that machine. So you might turn up and there'll be, oh, there's 10 credits on here. So you should leave it with at least 10 and probably 15, 16 for the next guy or girl to come along and play it. As an operator. I know, because they had a hard limit of 30 credits on those machines. And that became a real issue for us because we would constantly hit 30.
    37:37
    Yeah, it wasn't great for the operator. but occasionally you'll come in and you left it the night before and there were 20 credits on it and you come in the next morning and they're all gone and you think oh the operator had been in to empty the cash box or something then at this point but that got me into early games like Jungle Lord was a big favourite of mine and then we did Dolly Parton, Matter Harry Harlem Globetrotters classic games and I just loved those games and it wasn't just the money of it. I was actually quite good at it. So there was a constant battle to get the high score all the time and you come in and see whether your high score was still there. In the UK, the Pinball Owners Association already existed at that time. Yes, I guess so. Were you aware? No, not at all. I had no interest or involvement in the collector or side of things at all. All operators. I was a student. Okay, so strictly coin in the slot, paid by the game. And then I left there in 1983, September 1983, and went to work. And I was a trainee electrical engineer, sorry, electronic engineer.
    38:50
    And basically I had nothing more to do with pinball until the 90s, the start of the 90s. And it was in 1992 that I bought my first house. and he had a garage there and I thought hmm, I could just go and get my car in and then right at the end there's like a pinball shaped space I could kind of put that in there and so I did I went out and researched the market, saw what was available saw I couldn't afford to buy the Twilight Zone I really wanted and got myself a getaway to go in the garage and it was followed soon after by a fun house which went in the house and I later traded that for an Adams family that was a couple of years later and that was probably about 95 I think so here's why I asked about rec.games.pinball because that started bring up the front page of pinballnews.com please because we need to talk about that.
    40:02
    So November of 1990. In fact, today is November 20th, 1990. So this is the 31st anniversary of the founding, the launch of rec.games.pinball. I was involved in that. Oh, right. Okay. Happy birthday. Yeah, okay.
    40:22
    It was launched from New Hampshire in the United States. and at that point we were mostly people going to arcades one quarter at a time or one token at a time type of play, 50 cents for pinball probably but a few obnoxious guys were starting to get on there maybe around 1992 so the same pivotal year and saying well I just went into Betson and I just bought me a brand new inbox, whatever the current title was. And they were lording it over everybody else and pretty obnoxiously.
    41:12
    And somewhere along the line, that pattern became more and more common. Plus, there were people like Ted Estes. He was one of the people who voted for the creation of rec.games.pinball as a student. Uncle Willie. And pretty soon, he's loving pinball so much, he says, I want to get a job at a pinball manufacturing company. And so we started to have a new channel of communication through that whole stack from the player we have a mole or an agent inside the manufacturer
    41:52
    And you have to think about before that, the only way the manufacturer knew what the players were thinking about was to have communication through that whole stack, which is totally distorted.
    42:02
    There's no way that the operators are telling their distributors anything that really represents what the players want. but that was changing and I think we started to feel like people like Ted Estes and Larry DeMar were heroes to us that they listened to us through rec.games.pinball and so that built up a little bit more of a sense that the players should buy a game if they really like it and over time that turned into oh, if somebody were ever to make a Transformers game, I would have to buy one. I would be forced to buy one because I have to prove I'm the biggest Transformers fan.
    42:48
    Following the pattern of the KISS fans buying the KISS game used, this is going to translate into the new market. So that was sort of the roots, I think, of the players dominating. And you have recollections from the UK of when you first sensed that players were going to buy direct? Yes. When I was buying my games in 1992, it was very difficult to actually get anybody to sell you a game, to be honest. Oh, yeah. You go in the distributor and they say, no, you play on location. We already have our operators. They just wouldn't take you seriously because they thought, oh, there's this one guy who's – I can absolutely understand it from their point of view. They probably get all these tie-kickers around all the time saying, oh, yeah, that's a great game. I might buy one of those. They spend half an hour or an hour demonstrating the game to them, and then they just walk away and you never see them again. Yeah. So you can see why they wouldn't be interested. Or even if you did buy, how long before you save up enough money to buy another one? Well, that's it, yeah. They were interested in dealing in quantity, not one-offs. so eventually I went to the Williams distributor when I bought my fun house and I got that directly from them and they delivered it to my house and it was great it was a fantastic experience the getaway that I got came from an operator who also refurbished games and did sell them to the home but it was a small part of their business their main business was operating but having one at home was a very rare event there There was only a few people who were also into pinball at that time who were able to have them. I think if you said to anybody else, anybody normal, I've got a pinball machine at home, the drawer would hit the floor and say, where did you get one of those from?
    44:42
    I didn't know you could buy them. I thought they were just for operators. And of course they were for such a long period of time. Well, from the American perspective, in the 60s, I think people's jaws might not drop, but they might say, you know, they might in their mind form a picture of, oh, you've got one of those really ancient games. It was, you know, my first game in the home situation was a relative, and it was a flipperless game that had been made obsolete by flippers, so he had this flipperless game at home. So I knew right from birth, basically, that people do have pinball machines at home, but they're old. They're not like the ones you play on location.
    45:26
    So that would be like the American version of that. Right. Yeah, I mean, the People Learners Association then existed, and that was something which I joined and it was they produced a regular magazine as well, Bimble Player which was great and of course it's, once you start getting involved in the community then you do get to that point where we all end up really where you just want to buy more and more machines simply because they're there or it's a great deal and back then they were great deals but I found the problem that I had that by the time you got the magazine, the great deals had gone. So it wasn't that effective. Same with the pinball trader over here. Online connections. And there were online forums or discussion groups or conferences, as they were called then, for pinball, where people would exchange machines and put them up for sale or looking to buy and looking for connections. So even back then, there was a lot of, I would say unhappiness about the way in which you could buy a pinball machine. If they were for sale to the general public, they'd appear in a for sale free sheet and then you'd be chasing to get the very first publication of that so you could go through a potential pinball. And any of you old time eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire residents in Rhode Island, you might remember the old want advertiser and some people know the newsstand where they came out on Monday and they'd rush there and be the first to make that phone call. Yeah, we used to have a thing called LOOT which was published, I think it was three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And you had to make sure that you were there in order to get it. Chase the truck.
    47:17
    He's throwing off the copies at this newsstand. But it's just so different now. there are obviously still different tiers for buying home games. You can buy them from distributors, you can buy them from game room companies as well who tend to have a lot more overheads and the prices tend to be higher but they might refurbish old games and bring those back whereas distributors are not interested in that and then of course you've got the direct home to home sales which is well, it could be anything, couldn't it? It could be a great deal, it could be a pile of trash. You never quite know. Yeah, and the pin side now facilitates a lot of that, at least for people who self-identify as pinball collectors or pinball fans or multi-game owners. One of the legs of Gary Stern's three-legged stool, but there's that other leg of oh like the Transformers fan who's a fanatic about Transformers never going to buy any other new in box pinball machine except Transformers and now we have a channel that reaches out to them that kind of worries me a bit when I see somebody saying oh you bring out an XYZ game I'm going to buy it no matter what you think well if everybody's like that what's the incentive for the manufacturer to actually produce a good game all you need to do is of get an empty box and stick a Transformers logo on the side and they'd sell it for whatever. We'll bring out three versions of the empty box. Or take Striker Extreme and re-theme it one more time to be Transformers. Plus there are plenty of those parts left over, I'm sure.
    49:06
    Yeah, and by the time of the demise of Williams as a pinball manufacturer, sales direct to the player was a known thing, but not the market share that came about. In the yachts, it might be as much about operators receding as it would be about players coming forward to shift the market share. At that point, Gary Stern was talking about a two-legged non-stool, an unstable sitting device, which was lumping all the home sales together. But eventually, probably after Dave Peterson came in is when they said, okay, let's sit back and look at the market. And then they had the three legs. Yeah, I think that was there before, but Gary was relatively dismissive of the home market for a long time, as anybody who's heard him talk over a long period of time would know. He literally said, you guys are not on market. Right. That was probably around 2002. I remember him giving a talk at Expo where he was saying, we're selling to the operators, but we're telling them, as you heard earlier today, that the reason to keep buying pinball, even if Golden Tee is making more money or something, is the pinball you'll be able to resell into the home market near what you paid for it. So basically there's the advantage on the back end of having that game. Yeah, absolutely, which was transformative really. Once operators realised they could do that, then that changed the whole balance of the cost of a game. Previously, as we mentioned before, I mentioned this morning, about what operators used to do with games when they finished with them. And because they'd earned their costs, they'd done their ROI, and they'd made a decent profit for the operator, nobody else. If they sell that to the home market, then there's probably somebody who's not going to come out on location and play the games, you know, especially if it was somebody who really loved that game, was pumping the coins into the slot on a regular basis. And now they've got that in their home, they're probably not going to go out and they're probably not going to buy the beer in the bar that they're playing in either so best not to let them have the game because that's a slippery slope once you go down that path yeah which I think that's not really proven out by the people who have 22 games at home and they'll buy a 23rd and still you know they'll buy certain titles may be sight unseen but mostly they probably want to still go to some new type barcade, the one that has ten pinballs in a single location specifically pushing themselves as a pinball force. Going back to the point we were talking about earlier and the remakes, I think that's one of the drivers of that as well, is when you get a large multi-machine site opening up and suddenly they've got to put in 20, 30 pinball machines into a barcade. Well, where are you going to get 20 or 30 reliable machines? You're going to get 20 or 30 of the current model because even for the number of manufacturers we've got now, you've probably only got, what, four or five current titles available. So you have to go into the back catalogue. How about I buy new from the back catalogue? You know, the manufacturers are still selling those. Distributors still have them in stock. So yeah, and as Ryan was saying, you know, if I've got this barcade, well I put a medieval madness an attack from Mars a cactus canyon in there a monster bash as well brand new it's going to be reliable it's going to last it's going to look bright and shiny so yeah why not go back and remake them and also in some cases you'll get them with the latest technology which it didn't have when they first came out you get the insider connected as well on some of the Stern games now so you can and they might have I think some of the games are coming out will have different cabinets and upgraded lighting and better board sets in them than the original release even from the same manufacturer so it's a good reason to buy a modern one if you're going to need to supply a large number of games so I think that's helped and that's occurred a lot and these places open up and they're not old games that are in there it's a new bar it's a new location it's a new arcade and they've got to have new machines in there, even if they're not new title. And even more exciting for the manufacturers, I think, is for that type of pinball-centric location, some operators have to buy a premium to put on location. So we're kind of blasting down that jinx as well.
    54:25
    So we should end on this happy note. I think there's more to be said, definitely, about these pinball centric locations that have 10 or more pinball machines. And they say, well, we're a bar. We're officially a location on that chart there, but really we're about pinball. And that is such an exciting development. And it's making pinball more of its own little clubby way kind of thing that pinball people hang with pinball people, but we've got so much publicity. Yeah, it really just spread the word amongst the general population that had these great new barcades opened up, it's got all these great beers, and it's got all these pinball machines, and it just puts pinball so much in the mainstream. It's not a little niche thing there that you have to hunt out, the little bar down the street that's got maybe one or two machines in and nobody ever plays it. No, it's a big, shiny... People have invested a lot of money in this. It needs to be a success, and they wouldn't do that if they didn't think pinball was mainstream enough to appeal to a large population.
    55:35
    All right. Thank you very much, Martin. Thank you. Thank you, David. Thank you, everyone.