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Episode 44 - The Notorious Bally Art Department w/ Greg Freres

Wedgehead Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·52m 13s·analyzed·Aug 19, 2024
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TL;DR

Greg Freres recounts Bally's revolutionary in-house art dept and his 46-year pinball career.

Summary

Greg Freres, legendary pinball artist with 46+ years in the industry, discusses his career beginning at Bally's pioneering in-house art department in 1978. He details how Paul Faris revolutionized pinball art by shifting from silkscreen line art to four-color process printing, creating the iconic 'Bally look.' Freres describes the collaborative art department culture, his work with designers like George Christian and Dennis Nordman, and the intentional artistic direction that made Bally games visually distinct during the golden era (1979-1981).

Key Claims

  • Greg Freres was hired at Bally on June 12, 1978, after creating a portfolio-building effort of three weeks and interviewing with art director Paul Faris

    high confidence · Greg stated this specific date and hiring process directly in the podcast episode

  • Paul Faris intentionally brought four-color silkscreen process printing to pinball backglasses, departing from traditional silkscreen line art, which set Bally apart from competitors

    high confidence · Greg and hosts discuss this as a deliberate strategic shift led by Paul Faris; Greg confirmed it was 'definitely intentional'

  • The Bally art department operated as a cohesive in-house team where artists typically created entire games (backglass, playfield, cabinet) rather than splitting work among multiple artists, with rare exceptions like Skateball

    high confidence · Greg explained Paul Faris philosophy was to 'maintain one look from one artist on each game' with 'rare' splits

  • Paul Faris was integral to thematic development and actively art-directed illustrators with rough sketches and written notes, including on pieces like Fathom

    high confidence · Greg provided specific anecdotes of Paul leaving notes like 'make her prettier' and providing thumbnail sketches of vision for mermaids

  • Greg Freres retired after approximately 40 years in the pinball industry, recently stepping down from his role as head of Stern Art Department

    high confidence · Hosts introduced him as 'until very recently, the head of the Stern Art Department' and he confirmed 40-odd years in the business

  • The sexualized female imagery in Bally games from this era (the 'Bally-nipple era') originated more from the art department's creative choices under Paul Faris rather than upper management mandate

    medium confidence · When asked if it came from above, Greg said 'I would say it was probably more just the art department' and attributed some influence to Paul

  • George Christian, designer of 8-Ball Deluxe and other games, likely worked very closely with Norm Clark (head of design at Bally) in a collaborative design process

Notable Quotes

  • “It was June 12, 1978, and it went well. So that's all I can say.”

    Greg Freres @ early in episode — Precise recollection of his hiring date at Bally, establishing the beginning of his 46-year career

  • “Your illustration is good. He says, I have somebody waiting in the wings that's probably a better illustrator than you, but I like the fact that you know a bit about the production end of things.”

    Greg Freres @ ~10 min mark — Paul Faris valued production knowledge over raw illustration talent, showing his strategic thinking about the art department's needs

  • “It was definitely intentional. Paul was brought in. He was friends with Billy O'Donnell, the vice president of marketing at the time, Tom Neiman. He came in specifically to take pinball art in a new and more unique direction.”

    Greg Freres @ ~20 min mark — Confirms Paul Faris's deliberate mission to transform Bally's visual identity through four-color printing innovation

  • “We all became really great friends, you know, and working every day in one group, in one room. It was just, you know, I look back so fondly on those days, you know.”

    Greg Freres @ ~25 min mark — Emphasizes the tight-knit culture of the Bally art department as a key factor in its success and cohesive visual identity

  • “In college, I never wanted to be part of the fraternity structure of things, but this pinball thing is the best fraternity I could have ever asked for.”

    Greg Freres @ ~27 min mark — Reflects the deep personal bonds and community aspect of the pinball industry that sustained his 46-year career

  • “It's very hard to come up with reference of good mermaids. Right. And you got to understand back then there was no Internet. Right. There was no Google.”

    Greg Freres @ ~35 min mark — Highlights the practical constraints of 1970s-80s art direction and how artists had to improvise without modern research tools

  • “Greg, I don't know. It just, it's not pinball. This is not pinball... the color maybe. Maybe there are no happy colors.”

Entities

Greg FrerespersonPaul FarispersonKevin O'ConnorpersonDennis NordmanpersonMargaret HudsonpersonDave Christensenperson

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Paul Faris's deliberate shift from silkscreen line art to four-color silkscreen process printing marked a watershed moment in pinball art, elevating it to album-cover-quality illustration standards and directly contributing to Bally's market dominance during 1979-1981 golden era

    high · Greg confirmed 'It was definitely intentional' and described it as allowing art to be created 'like an album cover' with 'full color, full rendering' rather than 'comic book line art and flat colors'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: The Bally art department under Paul Faris operated as an intentionally unified creative unit where individual artists maintained singular artistic vision per game while cross-pollinating ideas, creating a recognizable 'Bally look' that distinguished it from competitors

    high · Greg stated Paul's philosophy was to 'maintain one look from one artist on each game' and described the department as 'the best fraternity I could have ever asked for' with artists inspiring each other daily

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Greg Freres recently retired as head of Stern's Art Department after ~46 years in pinball, recently attended a going-away party with his original Bally colleagues (Margaret Hudson, Kevin O'Connor, Pat McMahon), marking the end of an era for a core group that shaped modern pinball aesthetics

    high · Hosts introduced him as recently retired from Stern Art Department; Greg confirmed ~40 years in business; he attended retirement party with original Bally team members

  • ?

    design_innovation: Greg Freres' background in graphic arts production (half-toning, four-color separation, silkscreening) directly informed his hiring at Bally, where he helped Paul Faris establish an in-house darkroom and film production capability for faster turnaround on color-separation backglasses

    high · Greg explained Paul hired him partly because 'my minor in college was graphic arts' and Paul wanted to set up 'a darkroom at Bally' to keep film work in-house rather than outsourcing

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.035

0:00
My name is Greg and I am awesome. Everybody loves me because I am awesome. My name is Greg and I'm really, really awesome. If you don't believe me, just listen to what my backup singers have to say about the subject. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. My name is Alan. I'm your host of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast and I'm joined by my normal co-host Alex, the water boy in his basement studio. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Well, today we are joined on the show by a legend of the pinball industry. He's an artist with a career in pinball dating all the way back to the polyester pants era. His first gig was in the legendary Bally art department of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He survived the somewhat hostile merger and acquisition when the rival Williams bought Bally Midway in the 1980s and is probably best known for his offbeat and somewhat goofy approach to character design and many of his collaborations with his friend and famed pinball designer Dennis Nordman. He survived many booms and busts of the pinball industry, even had to go work for some video game companies in between for almost a decade, but eventually made his way back into pinball full time and he was, until very recently, the head of the Stern Art Department. With his illustrious career coming full circle, he helped usher in a new Stern pinball art golden era with the return to vibrant and illustrated art packages before finally retiring after some 40-odd years in the business. Our guest on the show today is the one and only Greg Ferris. How are you doing, Greg? I'm doing great. How are you guys doing? Doing excellent. Very honored that you would join us on our Humble Podcast. Alan and I are huge fans of your work. Yes. Can't speak highly enough of what you did for pinball. I appreciate that. Yeah, we want to start right at the beginning. I want to start with... Well, wait, wait, wait. Before we start, I got a bone to pick. Okay. Polyester pants. Yeah. First of all, maybe the executives were wearing polyester pants. Oh, wait, wait. So the commoners didn't wear polyester pants?
2:06
The art department for sure did not wear polyester pants. As far as I know, as far as I know. Well, you would know. So we can continue. I want to point something else in that intro is that Alan Allen's one that wrote that and he phrased it that you had to go work for video game companies. Most people would kill to work for a video game company.

low confidence · Greg stated this as speculation: 'I believe George was really working closely with Norm Clark. That's just my opinion' and 'I have no way to verify that'

  • Pat McMahon started at Bally around 1981 as a fresh-out-of-school intern before becoming an artist on games like Fishtails

    medium confidence · Greg estimated 'Pat started probably in 1981' and noted he was 'a kid when he started' as an intern

    • George Christian @ ~55 min mark — Shows the iterative design process and designer-artist collaboration, including George Christian's critique of color choices on Speakeasy

  • “It was a different era, gentlemen... Before global warming, yeah.”

    Greg Freres @ ~48 min mark — Contextualizes the artistic culture of the 1970s-80s as distinctly different from modern standards and sensibilities

    • George Christian
    person
    Tony Ramunniperson
    Pat McMahonperson
    Norm Clarkperson
    Billy O'Donnellperson
    Carol Mark Porthperson
    Bally Midwaycompany
    Williamscompany
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Skateballgame
    Fathomgame
    Frontiergame
    Speakeasygame
    Alanperson
    Alexperson
    Wedgehead Pinball Podcastorganization
    Northwest Pinball Showevent
  • ?

    design_innovation: The Bally art department routinely created custom typefaces and 'lockups' (word marks/logos) for each game, representing a distinct artistic discipline integrated into the overall visual identity; this practice diminished with later IP licensing that came with pre-established logos

    high · Hosts and Greg discussed custom typeface work on Xenon and other games; Greg noted Dave Christensen excelled at hand lettering and Margaret Hudson was 'great at designing fonts' and creating logos

  • ?

    industry_signal: During Bally's golden era, in-house art departments became a key competitive advantage; Williams also had in-house artists but lacked the thematic cohesion that Paul Faris achieved at Bally, suggesting leadership and vision, not just resources, drove market success

    medium · Greg noted Williams 'did have an in-house group of artists, but they...weren't held together with the glue that Paul Faris put together' and that Bally games had a unified look while competitors often contracted outside studios

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Paul Faris actively art-directed illustrators with rough sketches and written critique, indicating a top-down creative vision that balanced artist autonomy with thematic consistency—exemplified by notes like 'make her prettier' on Fathom sketches

    high · Greg described Paul leaving 'a note on it saying, make her prettier' and providing 'very rough sketch' thumbnails showing desired direction for mermaids on Fathom

  • ?

    historical_signal: 1970s-80s pinball art required physical research (books, libraries) lacking modern digital reference tools, forcing artists to work from memory and creative improvisation while meeting tight production schedules

    high · Greg explained finding mermaid references was 'very hard' because 'back then there was no Internet. Right. There was no Google' and artists had to 'just get going' without extensive research time

  • ?

    community_signal: The tight social bonds formed within Bally's art department—described by Greg as 'the best fraternity I could have ever asked for'—created lasting professional relationships that persisted across industry transitions (Williams acquisition) and spanned 46+ years, with recent reunion at retirement party

    high · Greg emphasized working 'every day in one group, in one room' created 'really great friends' and attended recent going-away party with Margaret Hudson, Kevin O'Connor, Pat McMahon from original Bally days

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Game whitewood design often evolved substantially from initial design-group concepts through art direction and marketing input; thematic identity was shaped through iterative collaboration rather than locked in at design phase, allowing flexibility in visual storytelling

    medium · Greg explained whitewood themes 'seldom would...hold its original theme that the game designer put on there' and described how marketing (Carol Mark Porth) and Paul influenced final themes like Frontier

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Greg Freres expressed regret about certain artistic choices in retrospect—describing his Speakeasy Leyendecker pastiche as 'horribly aped'—suggesting both technical growth over his 46-year career and evolving aesthetic standards in the industry

    medium · Greg said 'If I had to do it over' regarding Speakeasy's Leyendecker-influenced style, indicating self-critique and evolution in his artistic approach

    • 2:27
    I think it's funny how we look at everything through the lens of pinball. We're pinball guys, dude. We're all pinball guys. We don't care about video games. But we can get into some of that later work. I want to start with the infamous ballet art department from the late 1970s. For the listener, I want to call out a talk you gave at the Northwest Pinball Show, which an account called Ball is Wild on YouTube uploaded to YouTube. It's a great channel, has a lot of talks from Greg and from other pinball designers, artists, programmers over the years. Go check out that page. I watched your talk and I got a lot of info from it. So any of the listeners, you want to see more and hear it from Greg himself, he did a great kind of slideshow presentation. In that talk, you said you met Kevin O'Connor at your first job out of college and that he was able to get you an interview at Bali with the art director Paul Ferris. Can you tell us about that interview and how it went? Well, here I am, 46 years later. It was June 12, 1978, and it went well. So that's all I can say. Okay, now what I can say is Paul was very gracious because my portfolio, I put together a portfolio pretty quickly because my college portfolio was mostly fine art. It was one of those things where they're not going to want to see this. So when Kevin told me about this opportunity, I quickly worked for about three weeks every night, every weekend, all-nighters, trying to get a semblance of a portfolio together. that I thought would appeal to an art director at a pinball company. So I worked diligently on that portfolio, got it together, vetted it through Kevin first. Kevin was actually working, not as 9 to 5, but his secondary job was playing in a band. I went to a gig that he was playing, and at break time, he came off the stage and took a look at my portfolio and said, Yeah, this one's cool. This is cool. This is cool. This one, put a little more time into that. That might work. He goes, don't show him this one and blah, blah, blah. So with that said, I got the interview with Paul. And like I said, Paul couldn't have been more gracious. And when Paul found out that my minor in college was graphic arts, meaning I learned everything about not everything, definitely not everything. I learned a lot about half toning, four color separation, printing, silk screening, all the like, you know, stuff that goes with getting art to the finish, the keys to the actual production. Yeah, so when he found that out, he was excited because he was about to set up a darkroom at Bally that would be able, instead of sourcing it out, he would be able to keep all of that film work for silk screening in-house and get it turned faster instead of waiting on another company to turn it. He said, hey, your illustration is good. He says, I have somebody waiting in the wings that's probably a better illustrator than you, but I like the fact that you know a bit about the production end of things. So on that note, why don't you go spend another week and do something, a back glass, whatever you want, but mostly a back glass, I mean, because that kind of tells the whole story, right? He says, go create a pinball back glass for me and bring it back. And I was like, okay. I said, what theme? He goes, your choice. I was like, wow, okay. So I walked out of there and, again, crammed for, you know, the final examination, so to speak, and got a piece together called Summertime, which is really lame when I look back at it. But it was cool. I did like this whole, you know, you know, at the time, some themes of pinball machines were what they were, you know, and I did my homework and I was like, well, this could work. So I put together this illustration, brought it back in a week, and he goes, hang on a minute. And he brings down like three people with suits on, you know, and ties. I'm like, oh, boy. So one of them happened to be the, I think, vice president of sales or something. And he looked at it. He goes, you know, that's pretty close to what you've been talking about, Paul. He goes, yeah, that's what I was thinking. Apparently, they had thought about doing a skateboard theme. And so they said, this fits into a direction that we're heading. And so, yeah, this is looking good. The VP of sales gave me a nice handshake and said, good luck. Paul said, you know what? I think I'm going to hire you. I was like, awesome. I don't think I said awesome because that was probably too early for that word. It was something of that sort because I was really excited to get that job and get out of the job that I had been doing. Not that it was a bad job. I was learning a lot there too, but it was in advertising. And when I heard Kevin got this job at Bally Pinball, I was like, oh, that's really cool. Thanks to Kevin. You know, the rest is history. And that back glass that you ended up doing ended up being kind of reworked and it became skateboard, right? It did. It did become skateboard with a lot of reworking. The van that I had on the original summertime painting ended up being a modified version of that on the final skateboard back glass. That's a good van. I love pinball machines with vans in them. We have the front of an old Dodge Sportsman van in our bar wedge head. Oh, nice. Yeah. Nice. So we're van guys. Yeah. How good pinball machines have vans in them? Yeah. Well, and you need vans to move pinball machines. I mean, you could use other stuff, but it's better to use a van. It's easier. So we did a whole episode on our podcast about what we call kind of the Bally Golden Era and how it kind of coincided with the Susan B. Anthony coin from like 1979 to 1981 of which you are a part of. And when Bally started selling just obscene numbers of games and really started to outpace their other competition, there was no doubt some like really great play field designs from that time period. But it kind of seems to me that in most of the pinball people that what stood out immediately was the difference in the art that Bally was putting out during that time as compared to the other companies. Thank you. Yeah, I think most of the other companies were still maybe contracting outside studios and commercial artists at this time, whereas Bally had started their own in-house department led by Paul Ferris. Can you tell us more about that distinction and why you think ballet games looked like a departure from older games and how much of that was intentional or what the direction was? It was definitely intentional. Paul was brought in. He was friends with Billy O'Donnell, the vice president of marketing at the time, Tom Neiman. He came in specifically to take pinball art in a new and more unique direction. And one of the first things he researched was printing the backglasses for color process rather than silkscreen line art. Now, we all know that silkscreen line art was the main go-to for since the beginning of time, practically, for pinball. So for Paul to come in and go, all right, we're going to try something really different here. It really gave the art department and the illustrators a way to work the art more like an album cover, if I may borrow an analogy. You know, so full color, full rendering, not just the comic book line art and flat colors that Silkscreen provided, but something that had a little more substance to it. And I really think that that was the beginning of pushing the ballet art and the ballet art style in a new and different direction. I mean, of course, I think just the inherent talent that was there before Kevin and I got there, you know, Paul and Dave Christensen, both of those guys were doing two unique different methods of style. I mean, Paul had to start with the silkscreen backglasses and playfields and everything. Dave had been doing that for years. I think they both brought something unique to the table, but it was when Paul started working this whole idea of, all right, let's do more of an album cover design process with four-color process. And it was four-color silkscreen, which was not all that widely used at the time. So it was very unique. And technically speaking, it really pushed hard on the envelope of what had been done before. And I think one of the biggest complaints from people in-house was, well, now the art doesn't match the play field because the play field still had to be silkscreened. Oh, yeah. You know, line art, because we couldn't bring that technology to the play field that quickly. So there was some, a few people in-house that were like, I don't know if this is the right thing to do or not. But I think after a couple of games worth, I think they got the idea that, oh no, this is definitely something different and does set us apart from the competition out there. Yeah, absolutely. It allows for such much more theatrical, I don't know, illustrations than before that time. Although, I mean, doing silkscreen line art is not an easy task to make it look as good as a Dave Christensen could. You know, so it's definitely an art form unto itself. I think Paul bringing in the four-color process just broadened the whole aspect of what pinball art could be. And the results of it speak for themselves to the people that were I can understand being you know wary of it looking different than the playfields but obviously those games stood the test of time Speaking of the other guys working there with you so like you mentioned Paul Ferris Dave Christensen and there was a lot of other talent there Kevin Margaret Hudson Tony Ramuni and stuff What was the collaborative process like when you were in that department with all like the greats that we look back on now Because you guys would kind of split games up differently than how, don't know how it's necessarily done at Stern, I don't want to speak out of place, but it kind of seems like one guy gets his name on a game. And whereas back in the Valley days, someone might do the plastic, someone else might do the playfield, and someone else might do the back glass. Just how was that split up, I guess? Sure. I would say on rare occasions would it get split up. And it was probably because the schedule had been shifted around to bring another game up faster than what was previously planned. And so in Paul's, you know, tutelage of the whole art department, his point was, let's try to maintain one look from one artist on each game. So I would say it was rare to split up the project into, like, different artists. I will speak to that immediately and saying the easiest, for instance, is skateboard. So Skateball was the first backlass I ever created at Bally. Then, for whatever reason, the game itself got shelved. Margaret had started a playfield and it never saw the light of day. And Paul said, I don't want to waste that backlass or this theme. Let's put this, you know, put this away for a while and hopefully we'll resurrect the theme at some point down the road. Skateball was one instance when it was time to make skateball. The backlash was done, but I was working on a different project, so I couldn't come in and finish the project myself. Gotcha. That game, I believe, we had Kevin O'Connor did the playfield, Margaret Hudson did the plastics, and Pat McMahon did the cabinet. So or no, maybe I'm wrong. Margaret did the cabinet. So she did the plastics and cabinet and Kevin did the play field. So was Pat McMahon at the company at that time? I didn't realize that. By the time we did Skateball, I don't know exactly what year. I want to say Pat started probably in 1981. Oh wow, okay, that's longer than I thought. I mean, he's done some art on some games I love too, like Fishtails for the listener. He started as an intern at Bally, so he was like fresh out of school and or or maybe still in school. He was a kid when he started. So weren't we all?
    15:49
    That's interesting though with Skateball. That was that's the game specifically I think of with the different artists. It's famous for that kind of, and it looks good. It looks cohesive. I think that's the thing about the Bally Art Department, even though you all had your own skills and talent, there's something about every single game. I mean, I guess it was the same with you running the Stern Art Department. A Stern game looks like a Stern game, whether or not different artists do it. At this time, the Bally games look like Bally games. The Gottlieb games used to look like Gottlieb games, but there was only ever one artist doing every game. So like, that makes sense, right? But the Bally games look just like cohesive packages. They look like a Bally game. They always look like a Bally game. I think part of that is the in-house art department because Williams did have an in-house group of artists, but they, to me, weren't held together with the glue that Paul Ferris put together. We all became really great friends, you know, and working every day in one group, in one room. It was just, you know, I look back so fondly on those days, you know, and Tony Ramuni, he worked at Williams first. And when he saw what was going on at Bally, he was like, I want to be there. Yeah, I got it. So, you know, he put his portfolio together and interviewed with Paul and, you know, Paul ended up hiring Tony. Like I said, we were just, we became really close friends. It was just magical. I mean, just recently, Stern had a little going away party for me for my retirement. And Pat McMahon, Margaret Hudson, Kevin O'Connor, we were all there together. It was great. I always tell people, in college, I never wanted to be part of the fraternity structure of things, but this pinball thing is the best fraternity I could have ever asked for. That's very cool. I want to say, like, your Bally days, Bally were pioneers in, you know, both solid state electronics, they were first in the market, and with licensing games, two things that, you know, are still done today. However, the majority of the games you were making at the time were still original themes and they would remain that way for maybe like another decade or so, at least. I just want to know, I've always wanted to ask a pinball artist this, especially from this time period is, how do you look at the whitewood of a game like which became Fathom, one of the games you did? And you go, this is going to be murderous mermaids, right? Or how do you look at Frontier and go, this is going to be Jeremiah Johnson, Grizzly Adams who fights a bear shirtless with a knife? Who made those decisions and how far along in the development of a game were usually brought in as the artist? Good question. I would say at that time, we of course had a marketing department and we had Paul Ferris, who was very involved in choices that were made for thematic development. And with Fathom, for instance, he was integral, integral. Man, I can't say that word. You know what I'm trying to say. He was a huge part in getting me to understand what he wanted to see. It's as if, like the art director said, okay, murderous mermaids, as you put it. That's what the theme is, and here we go. And he goes, show me a layout. I've told people this before. Paul did a great job of actually art directing me on that piece and actually did little thumbnail sketches that said, Here's like what I envision like a mermaid, the kind of feel that I want to see you create. And so he would give me that like very rough sketch, you know, and then I'd go at it. It's very hard to come up with reference of good mermaids. Right. And you got to understand back then there was no Internet. Right. There was no Google. There was no Google searching. Right. You did your best to look at books, go to the bookstore or go to the library and look up mermaid illustration or whatever. But, you know, you didn't always have time to do extensive research. You needed to just get going, you know. So between Paul and I, that game was his vision of what should be happening and how to go about it and stuff like that. To the point where there were, you know, sketches where he would note it after I left for the day. I would come back and there'd be a note on it saying, make her prettier.
    20:26
    Stuff like that, you know, and it's like, OK, she's a sketch, you know, give me some time to work on it. But it was the kick in the ass that I needed to take it a little bit further. And going to Frontier, that was the head of our marketing department was Carol Mark Porth. And she was married to a photographer that did most of the photography of the games that we were doing for the brochures and stuff. And she said to Paul, she goes, you know, you guys should really think about using my husband as a model. And he goes, I've never met your husband. So she showed him pictures. She goes, come on, Grizzly Adams or what? And he goes, oh, wow. So that one got assigned to me and he said, we're going to get all sorts of great photography from this guy because he's really into it. We want to do this as kind of a send-up to like a Grizzly Adams theme without licensing the Grizzly Adams, obviously. So that's kind of, you know, back in that era, there was other methods too where we would just, you know, we'd get a whitewood and, you know, the design group would have like a rough idea of what it could be, you know, thematic. And then Paul or marketing would take a look at it and they'd be like, well, what if we did this? You know, there was various ways to do it, but seldom, maybe not seldom, but I would say seldom would a whitewood hold its original theme that the game designer put on there with the amount of inserts and, you know, stuff that they had to work with back then. Interesting. Continuing with Bally-specific art, we always kind of lovingly refer to this era here, this is Alan's phrase, not mine for the record, as the Bally-nipple era, mostly due to Paul Ferris and Dave Christensen's drawings at the time. It was also kind of just a product of the time, and you saw that a lot with high fantasy and the movie posters, everything just of that era. Yeah, that Frank Frazetta type of high fantasy art. Was that Paul's choice or did that just kind of come from upper management? Was it a specific sales tactic from marketing? We're just curious who was determining this. Yeah, like was it like the inmates running the prison here or was it like coming from the guards down? You know what I mean? Okay, let's start by saying I'm appalled. No, I'm just kidding.
    23:02
    That was a different era, wasn't it? Yeah. It was a colder era. Like, everyone was a lot colder. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Before global warming. Before global warming, yeah.
    23:15
    You're right. And if you look closely on Harlem Globeshotters, where there are no nipples, there is a big white spot on Chicago because we had so much snow that year. Talk about global warming. We had so much snow that year. It was a record year of snow, and I had to put that on the globe to make sure that everybody remembered that. Remembered for posterity. Chicago got snowed in, and I left that mark on Harlem Globetrotters' back glass. As far as was that coming from above or was it the art department? I would say it was probably more just the art department. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, did it bother the suits? Like, I mean, clearly they produced these games. So like and they did well. So I'm assuming it's like, oh, these games were selling the shit out of these games. Like, let's keep going. It was a different era, gentlemen. You know, it's kind of ironic that, you know, years later I do a thing called Woe Nelly. Oh yeah, we're going to talk about Woe Nelly. I can't wait. I love that game. Here's a sidebar. So on the backlist for Skateball, I had started the illustration and I had done a sketch and then it became the beginning of the illustration and I was in the middle of working on it. And just like Fathom, one night, Paul, you know, who's always stayed late, left a pasted up sketch on my sketch with the girl on the left side, the girl and the guy. And it was his version of her. And that's the one that I then kind of took and said, OK, if that's what he wants me to do, I guess I'll take it that far. OK, yeah. So it was coming from Paul. Paul was sculpting all of you guys. Yeah, just to put a finer point on it, it wasn't all Paul, but there was definitely some influence there. The other thing that stands out, taking a right turn from that discussion, the other thing that stands out is all the custom typeface work that you guys did during this time, which was just absolutely incredible. In particular, the lettering done for Xenon, Apeball Deluxe, Centaur, Fathom, Paragon, Future Spa, Spectrum, Skateball, Vector, I mean all of them, really. All these games had these crazy custom word marks. Thematic typeface made for all of them. And that's such a distinct skill in and of itself. And all of you guys are fantastic illustrators. But you're also creating these word marks that are incredible. I guessing what I asking is what are your recollections of how much effort that you guys put put into these wordmarks And how did you go about designing custom type on your games Sure The interesting part of that question is wordmarks So I learned another new phrase that I had never used in my career before, and that is a lockup. I learned from my successor that in the world of design, when you do a logo or a group of words that creates a logo, it's also called a lockup. And I assume that's kind of what you're pointing at when you talk about the word mark, right? Yeah. Dave Christensen did amazing hand lettering on the play fields, which is inspiring to everybody. I mean, he was the master at hand lettering. I own a Captain Fantastic game just for the art. And some people say, well, you certainly didn't buy it for the gameplay. No, that's not true. That's not true. Whoa. It's a fun game. It's a fun game. But some people, you know, have dissed it somewhat for its gameplay. But I don't. It's a classic. Yeah, it's a classic. Like I said, I bought it for the art. It's an amazing – and when you look at the lettering on the playfield, amazing. But yeah, the logotypes or the word marks or the lockups, whatever we want to call it, it was upon us as the illustrator for the game to also create that as well. So like I said, Skateball kind of had like a nice design font to the whole logo, title logo. And it was just the whole art department thing where we're all inspiring our, you know, each other. And it's like, oh, that's cool, you know. And it's like, okay, I got to do something cooler than that. There was a bit of that going on. And Margaret, too. Margaret Hudson was great at designing fonts, not designing fonts, but working with fonts to create interesting logos for her games. Yeah. A Ball Deluxe. I mean, yeah. And Spectrum, like in particular, are I mean, this whole era is like it blows my mind. Like we have a friend of ours who's a graphic designer and I did graphic design in school and I do it for our bar. We geek out about the text and the typefaces and just the custom lettering. Like, not only is the illustrations just incredible, but I think what's sometimes missed is the most obvious thing, which is, like, the title of the game and how stylized it is. And the ballet games from this era are just, across the board, just incredible. It's also something you don't really have to worry about nearly as much with modern games, just because when you're getting an IP, it already has the look associated with it. You already have a logo. But it's an art form in itself, just creating logos out of thin air like that. It was definitely cross-pollination. We were, you know, everybody was seeing what everybody was working on, and it just, like, helped, you know, blossom the whole flower, so to speak. You collaborated multiple times with, you know, some pretty famous pinball designers, which we will get to later. But the first one from this era that I really want to ask you about and spend a little bit of time on is George Christian. He designed games like 8-Ball, 8-Ball Deluxe, Mystic, Frontier, and you were the artist on four George Christian games. Frontier, Speakeasy, Black Pyramid, and Lady Luck. Lady Luck's so good. Alex and I are big George Christian fans, and we feel like he's a super under-known or under-appreciated name in pinball history. And we just want to ask you, because we don't know a lot about him, and we're trying to find out more about him. But it's like, do you have any memories of working with George that you can share with us? Kind of like a ghost in pinball history, it seems. For a guy that made some very successful games, it's not a lot to know about him. Yeah, George, very nice guy. Yeah, I did do quite a number of games with him. Let me just frame it by saying back then, Norm Clark was the head of design at Bally at the time. And he had all the designers working under him. And I believe Norm pretty much would help design each playfield as far as what works, what doesn't work, because he was the senior guy, right? He was the guy that had tried things, failed, made it work, you know. Right. He was really overseeing all the guys that worked for him. And George was, I believe, not to take anything away from George, but I believe George was really working closely with Norm Clark. That's just my opinion. Closer than, like, say, Jim Patla or Greg Kamek or some of the other designers at the time were working with Norm? Like, you felt like it was more of a collaborative process, like Norm Clark and George Christian were making these games? I think so, but I have no way to verify that. I didn't go back and watch them work because I was too busy doing my job. I just have this feeling. I don't know why. Anyway, besides that, George was a pleasure to work. He was originally from Iran, and so when he came to the States and finally got his citizenship, he had changed his name to sound more American. America because he was now an American citizen. And so he picked a very strong kind of opposite of what an Iranian name would be. Chose Christian, right? He was interesting to work with because we on Speakeasy, for instance, I think it was Paul's idea to do kind of like that throwback, Lyondecker kind of vibe for the backlash and something that would just translate well a 1920s era. I don't know if I was totally into it as far as a team choice, but at the time it was like, okay, well, I got a job. I'm going to do my job. So, yeah, I did a little bit of research on Leyendecker. Horribly aped his style, you know, if I had to do it over. But anyway, but with George at Design of the Playfield, the first pass of the Playfield color that I did, you know, we do color sketches before we started separating the art. But George came in and in his accent, I don't want to, you know, destroy anything here, but, you know, he would say, Greg, I don't know. It just, it's not pinball. This is not pinball. I said, well, what do you mean, George? He goes, the color maybe. Maybe it's the color. Maybe there are no happy colors. I said, oh, no happy colors. I said, well, it's a speakeasy theme, so I'm trying to capture kind of a graphic style and vibe from that era, and I'm trying to use muted colors rather than the typical red, yellow, blue stuff that you see on other products. I want to set this apart a little bit because of the theme speakeasy. I want to kind of capture that vibe, you know, and give it that look. And he goes, oh, well, now that you say that, maybe that's okay. I said, okay, well, let's go with it and see how it works. You know, so the rest is history, but it was a departure even for me to go in that color choice that I was picking PMS colors that I had never, I never would have picked on other games, you know. Right. One other thing, the Lady Luck thing, that was after George and Norm had left Bally. Right. And they came back and designed it for Bally Midway, and it was brought in as a finished playfield with the name Lady Luck on it. So I just, again, trying to ape somebody else with a bit of a Nagel vibe to it. So, yeah. It's gorgeous. I mean, I love that game. Yeah. Your work is gorgeous. I mean, we're big fans. Like, this is hard to be objective because, like, we're just really big fans, but we love your work. Thanks. You listed Dave Christian, the artist, Dave Christensen, the artist that did games like Mata Hari, Captain Fantastic, Fireball, Wizard, Old Chicago. You listed his work in particular in that talk you gave as an inspiration to you when you first started in pinball. Can you describe that to the listeners, like why that felt so different? I just want to focus on at the end of this episode, kind of Dave Christensen, since you said that he was the artist that impressed you the most when you got in. And I also know that his name is Mad Dog, his nickname. Do you know, can you tell us that? Like, do you know the history of that nickname? No. You don't know the history of that? Okay. I don't know the history of that name, but I got a couple of stories. But anyway, so in college, because of the fact that Chicago didn't have very many pinball machines, if any, because of the same laws against pinball that New York had in the early 70s. Well, you know, from the 40s until the 70s, whenever that time period was. I'm not a historian, but I've seen some movies. I was in college and I was, you know, down in a small town, you know, in western Illinois. That's where I went to school. And it was Macomb. At the Student Union, there were like three pinball machines and one of them was Wizard. So I was inspired by Dave's work when I was in college. And little did I know that, you know, there'd be a connection someday. I would study that look and that vibe. And it was just, you know, when you look back on that, on his work, it just like defined, in my opinion, pinball art. It wasn't pure comic book art. It wasn't, there wasn't anything else like it except on a pinball machine. And it was a little risque, for sure. There was something like edgy about it, and that's what intrigued me. It's like, wow, for the fact that somebody gets paid to do this for a living, and then I found that he would hide his signature very small on backglasses or playfields.
    36:30
    And I was like, wow, there's attached a name to it. I was like, there's somebody out there doing a living, you know, making art for pinball machines. And I was like, that inspired me as an artist to lean more towards commercial art than fine art, knowing that if I lean towards fine art, I was either going to teach or, you know, starve. Yep. So that's what drove me towards commercial art in the first place. And that just sealed it. When I saw that kind of thing going on, I was like, wow, this is where I want to be. But it was all very subconsciously because I never got out of school and raced over to Bally or Williams or anywhere because I didn't know that you could get a job in that field. So I was really grateful for meeting Kevin O'Connor when I did at the job that I had right out of school. Yeah, that's awesome. I think a lot of people have had a similar take. For a lot of people, it was Dave Christensen. For a lot of people, it was Paul Ferris. For a lot of people, it was you, Greg. You were the same thing. There's a point in time where people are seeing pinball machines out in the wild and they're struck by how good the art is or it draws them into the game. Cool. I think that's kind of the fun part to me about pinball art. Like you mentioned, it's commercial art. It serves its purpose, and it's trying to sell you on putting your quarters into the game. But it does kind of exist on a higher plane than that because guys are spending, you know, $10,000 to put this piece of art in their house. I think that's, I don't know why it's just such an interesting thing, and I like hearing from you artists that work in the field. I'm very interested also in talking a little bit about technology. And again, I'm going to point people to Greg's talk where he talks about this in his Northwest Seminar, and I'll link that in our show notes for everyone. But technology's changed a lot since the late 1970s and the early 1980s of this period. The way to get art onto a playfield, you laid it all out and you laid it out as thumbnails to pencil sketches, then to type pencils, then to inks, then to marker, then to a ruby-lith film, then color proofs before the final print. Like, can you describe, was that process as complicated as it sounds like to maybe a layman listener? Or was that very streamlined and made total sense? It is complicated It a process for sure It definitely starts from nothing And you look at your sheet of paper and you start doodling literally And that covers the thumbnail right You might do a series of small sketches that are maybe you know two inches by three inches just to start thinking about composition What is the largest element on this back glass that's going to attract somebody from across the room? Because we, you know, at Bally, one of the things I learned at Bally from both Paul or Dave or whoever was you got to have that impact from across the room looking at that back glass. And it's got to stand out next to how many other back glasses that are in that row. And you want to be able to get that person to walk over. So basically, it's point of purchase advertising. It's getting somebody to come over to that game and want to drop money into it to have some fun, right? And so it literally starts with that thumbnail sketch of just figuring out your composition, where your large elements are, where your details are going to be, what kind of details are going to be in there. And then it's a selection process where you go, okay, that one feels pretty good. Let me blow that up and start to develop that into something bigger. And then now I'm working maybe at 12 by 14, whatever. And it's definitely not that glass size yet, but it's still small, but much bigger than a thumbnail. And that's where I start working out, you know, some more compositions, more of the detail work, where the logo, the title of the game is going to go and that kind of thing. And then over time, like people think that artists just sit down and draw something once and they're done. But that's not true. Tracing paper comes into play and you just keep overlaying and overlaying and overlaying to the point of today where now you've got layers to work with in Photoshop or whatever you choose to work in. It's similar that you have these layers that are like tracing paper and you keep refining that sketch until it becomes tighter and tighter. Once you get to a tight pencil, then you can at least ink it and then if it was a playfield, you would ink the whole playfield. You would create a film positive of that ink and then you would cut ruby lift after doing a color sketch to show where, you know, that artwork, where the color artwork would go. And then you painstakingly had to go in and create each color by hand by cutting this material called ruby lift, which is really hard to describe into any kind of detail. But it was like a soft gel on top of like clear plastic. And you would have to use a very light touch, but not too light, and cut through, but not cut through the plastic layer. Wow. And peel off areas that you did not want to print and leave the areas that you did want to print. Then that was very painstaking, but it's what we had to work with back at the time. So that's where you can see, going back to our earlier conversation, how the four-color process became such a big thing for backglasses. Because we could then, you know, work directly on a piece of illustration board and just create the whole look and vibe of the theme with traditional tools like pencil, color pencil, acrylic paint, airbrush, whatever. And have a finished illustration that everybody could look at and appreciate for what it was. But when you looked at all these pieces of a playfield with all the layers of ruby lift, and, you know, back then we were doing anywhere from 12 to 14, 15 colors on a playfield. So each color had its own separate layer of ruby lift to create that color. That's what I just wanted to talk about because I did some darkroom stuff like yourself, and I did screen printing when I was in high school. You know, that was decades after this, and it was still a process. And when I heard you give this speech, this talk at the Northwest Show, I was like, man, I don't think people realize, like, how labor-intensive this was. Yeah, and it wasn't just, like, you guys were drawing art. Like, hey, draw cool art, color it, and then, like, it just sort of magically gets printed. Like, somebody else handles the details. It's like, you actually had to go in there and, like, make it printable. Absolutely. Which is its own skill. And Margaret Hudson was a huge factor in getting that part of the stuff done. So a lot of times, either Paul or Kevin or myself might need some help in getting the whole job done. So Margaret, we'd give a color sketch to Margaret, and she would follow that as a roadmap and then cut the layers of ruby lift for any of the other artists if she wasn't working on her own project. She was a bit shy about her own illustration skills when she first started. Hard to believe she was. So she gradually went from kind of being a production artist to a more full-on illustrator to the point where she started, you know, doing these amazing pieces herself. She was a big part of getting play fields and plastics to the finish line back then. That's cool. That's very cool. Well, you can see why it's all hands on deck when you explain the process. Yeah, for real. One game before we wrap up our episode with you discussing your time at Bally Midway, one game in particular I want to talk about is one that I had a friend specifically go out of his way to seek out this game for the theme and the art package, much like you did with Captain Catastic. And that game is Hardbody. What are your feelings on that game? You know, there was a very different technological process, I assume, than what you just described. And yeah, I just wanted to, you know, I just wanted to give Hardbody some love because I know it's not a game that everybody appreciates the art package on so much. But I just wanted to personally tell you that one person out there went out of his way to buy it specifically for the art.
    45:30
    Okay, let's rewind just a couple weeks. I spent two months, my last two months at Stern, I spent with the new art director at Stern, Sebastian Napoli. I brought him on to take my role as art director at Stern. And we spent two months together in an office so I could like mind meld or brain dump or whatever you want to call it. Yep. As much information as I could in a compact amount of time. And one day he asked me, he goes, what's your favorite game that you ever worked on? What's your favorite art package? And I said, that's not a fair question because they're like my kids. I said, I don't have any favorite kids. I can't say that any one of my art packages is my favorite because each one of them is unique and it has its own story, backstory and what was going on at the time in my life and that kind of thing. So I said, but the one piece that I'm not fond of and I'm not shy to tell you is hard body. And he was like immediately going on the Internet, like looking it up. He goes, oh, dude, this is like so 80s. This is cool. How can you how can you hate this? I was like, oh, I can hate it easily.
    47:01
    You're allowed to because you made it. Here's the whole story. Back then, Bally was, you know, diversifying and they were growing and they took all that money from Pac-Man and became this huge conglomerate. So they ended up purchasing Chicago health clubs and turned it into Bally health clubs. And the spokesmodel was Rachel McLeish. She had just won Miss Universe for bodybuilding, right? And our current president at the time was like, hey, you know, Gottlieb's doing those photo backlasses. I think, what would you think that we kind of switched gears and started doing that kind of thing? And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea at all. I said, Bally is known for illustration. I said, and I don't want to be the guy that kills illustration for Bally. I said, this is like a dream come true for any artist to work in pinball. I said, so I don't want to water it down by putting photography on a game. And he was like, well, just give it some thought. Well, then because of the corporate status at the time, it wasn't just his decision. It was a bunch of people's decisions, not mine. And they were all like, oh, no, no, we need to cross pollinate here and we need to get a little health clubby thing going here. Can we do something that kind of shines a light on health and bodybuilding and, you know, that kind of thing. So, yeah, that's that's kind of how that turned out. You were chosen for your ripped physique, I imagine, at the time in the 1980s. No, that was not me. That was not me. No, I was chosen because I think I drew the short straw. No, I'm just kidding.
    48:54
    I did hear one cool thing is I did go out to Hollywood for the photo shoot the week before Christmas and got to work with a guy, a photographer named Harold Lloyd Jr., whose father was a silent film star. Interesting. If you've ever seen the famous photograph of a guy with horn-rimmed glasses hanging off of a big clock above a city street, look that one up. That's Harold Lloyd from the silent era, and I got to work with his son, Harold Lloyd Jr., to do the photo shoot for Hardbody. So at least there was some connection there. That was kind of a cool little connection that I had for just that day at the photo shoot. Yeah, that's interesting. Other than that, that's not one of my proudest moments in my pinball history. Well, I still appreciate it, and I know there's plenty of other people that do, too. Yeah, it's interesting, and we're not going to ask you to name your favorite project since you can't name them since they're a kid. You're going to ask him anyway? He's not going to answer it. Our last question was what your favorite project was that you worked on. Or maybe what's your favorite project that you didn't work on during this ballet era? If you don't want to choose one of your own, what's the game that stands out from maybe the class of 81 to you from an art perspective? Oh, just from that group? Well, it has to be Fathom because everybody, the whole world seems to gravitate towards Fathom. It's gorgeous. You know, Mark Wainer told me one time, he goes, what's amazing about that era is you put Fathom and then you put Medusa right next to it. And you've got this beautiful contrast of blues and greens on Fathom and reds and yellows and oranges on Medusa. He goes, I love seeing those two games next to each other. Oh, yeah. That's a great point. Well, Greg, we appreciate you joining us on this episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. Reminisce about your time in the Valley Art Department during its heyday when Valley was at kind of the top of the industry. Pinball is a fickle business, as you've been a part of and will cover in future episodes. We just want to thank the listeners for listening to another episode, and we'll have Greg back, talk more about his later career in the next episode. So until next time, good luck, don't suck. Now shut up and listen to this, dick. This is metal for fish. Fish don't got no good metal to listen to. Yeah, it's true. Fish, huh? This one's called Mermaid-er. It's about mermaid murder.
    51:34
    Gobb, Dune, Medieval Madness. Stop the truck! This is amazing! I mean, there must be billions of fish out there. It's a totally untapped market. And so many hits, too. Electric eel chair. Yeah! Scald and gutted and undercooked. Yeah! Scuba tank filled with fart. Yeah! You boys knocked it completely out of the park. I am back on top. I'm going straight to the label.