Greg Ferrer recounts 40 years in pinball art, from childhood to Bally hiring.
Summary
Greg Ferrer, art director at Bally and later Williams, delivers a 40-year career retrospective on pinball artwork and design philosophy. He traces his personal journey from childhood inspirations (Elvis, Beatles, Mad Magazine, his mother's art) through his college years and entry into the industry via point-of-purchase advertising, detailing his hiring at Bally in 1978 and his evolution as a pinball artist alongside legendary figures like Kevin O'Connor, Paul Faris, and Dave Christensen.
Key Claims
Pinball was banned in Chicago until 1978; Greg didn't experience pinball until vacationing in Wisconsin as a kid.
high confidence · Greg Ferrer, main speaker, personal childhood memory
Greg was hired at Bally on June 12, 1978, after a one-week backglass design test featuring artwork called 'Summertime'.
high confidence · Greg Ferrer, specific date and hiring story
Kevin O'Connor, a pinball artist, got a job at Bally and called Greg six months later to encourage him to apply.
high confidence · Greg Ferrer describing the 'Kevin connection'
Paul Faris was the art director at Bally when Greg joined; Faris valued Greg's darkroom experience and set up a complete darkroom with film processor.
high confidence · Greg Ferrer, direct account of hiring and initial role
Black Pyramid marked the peak of the 'Bally high' period; after that, pinball declined as video games took off.
medium confidence · Greg Ferrer's subjective timeline/opinion
Hardbody was a photographic backglass game forced on Greg by corporate (Bally had acquired Chicago health clubs and wanted to feature Rachel McLish); it was the only photographic backglass Bally ever produced.
high confidence · Greg Ferrer, detailed account of a frustrating project
Dan Langlois was a young designer brought to Bally to shake things up; he worked on experimental games like Black Belt, Strange Science, Lost, and Escape from the Lost World.
high confidence · Greg Ferrer, describing Langlois's role and game portfolio
Early pinball artists (1940s-1960s) worked with simplicity, primary colors, and geometry; art was based on the philosophy that happy characters on the playfield should encourage coin insertion.
high confidence · Greg Ferrer's analysis of design philosophy and influence from early designers
American Pinball's Whoa Nellie was inspired by the classic Daisy May (made July 1954), which coincidentally was Greg's birth month/year.
Notable Quotes
“Back in the day, we did things differently back then.”
Greg Ferrer @ early in presentation — Sets up the historical context of his career and generational differences in pinball design and production
“If those people on the back glass and on the playfield are having fun, I'm gonna have fun by inserting a coin and playing this game—that's the theory.”
Greg Ferrer (quoting Dennis about Roy Kurtz/Roy Parker art philosophy) @ mid-presentation — Core design philosophy for first impressions and player engagement
“The artists are the minstrels of the soul.”
Greg Ferrer (quoting his college watercolor teacher) @ college section — Reflects the fine art vs. commercial art tension in his education
“You know what, I'm gonna give you a test. I want you to take one week and come up with something that looks like a pinball backglass.”
Paul Faris (quoted by Greg Ferrer) @ hiring story — The pivotal test that got Greg into Bally; demonstrates Faris's hiring approach
“Why didn't you say that in the first place? I'm setting up a complete darkroom with a processor, and we're gonna keep a lot more of that work in-house.”
Paul Faris (quoted by Greg Ferrer) @ after hiring — Shows how Greg's minor in industrial education/graphics was the real key to getting his foot in the door
“This is the best fraternity I could have ever been in.”
Greg Ferrer @ mid-presentation, discussing Bally art department bonds — Reflects the tight-knit community and lifelong friendships formed in the early Bally art department
“For me, my biggest accomplishments in high school ironically were not through biology or chemistry—they were through film, helping others with film projects, and playing rock and roll for money.”
Greg Ferrer @ high school section — Shows early pattern of choosing creative work and monetizing art, foreshadowing his pinball career
historical_signal: Greg Ferrer provides detailed first-person account of Bally art department 1978-1999, documenting personnel, design philosophy, and key game titles during the golden and decline periods of pinball.
high · Specific hiring date (6/12/1978), art director Paul Faris, game titles (Black Pyramid, Hardbody, Strange Science), competitive context with Williams/Steve Ritchie
?
design_philosophy: Early pinball design was grounded in the principle that happy, smiling characters on backglass and playfield would encourage players to insert coins and engage with the machine.
high · Greg quoting Dennis on Roy Kurtz's work: 'everybody in that art work is having fun, they're all smiling, they're all having a good time...that should translate to the people that walk up to the machine'
?
personnel_signal: Kevin O'Connor recruited Greg into Bally after working together at point-of-purchase advertising; demonstrates informal talent networks in early pinball industry.
high · Kevin called Greg six months after moving to Bally to encourage portfolio submission and facilitate interview with Paul Faris
?
product_strategy: Bally licensed major IP themes during the 1970s-80s including Harlem Globetrotters, Rolling Stones, and other branded properties to drive arcade appeal.
medium · Greg mentions licensed themes as part of the 'Bally high' period with freedom to work on diverse creative content
~
sentiment_shift: Pinball experienced significant decline starting after Black Pyramid as video games and later laserdisc games took market share; this is reflected in Greg's career trajectory from 'high' to 'low' periods.
Topics
Pinball art direction and design philosophyprimaryGreg Ferrer's 40-year career history at Bally, Midway, and WilliamsprimaryEarly pinball design (1940s-1960s) and artist influencesprimaryPersonal artistic development and childhood inspirationsprimaryBally art department culture, community, and key personnelprimaryPinball decline during video game era; competitive rivalry with WilliamssecondaryModern American Pinball and contemporary game developmentsecondaryCollege education, art school debate, and career path decisionssecondary
Sentiment
positive(0.78)— Greg is nostalgic and warm about his Bally years and the art department fraternity; frustration about the Hardbody project and industry decline during the video game era; optimistic and proud about his contributions; slight melancholy about aging and Alzheimer's in his mother, but frames it positively
Transcript
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I am Greg Freres and you're about to witness a little snippet of what that 40 year experience was like for me personally that you will hear many opinions from me as well so you know always remember that what you hear is an opinion of mine and maybe not based on actual facts no that's not true I'll I'll try to keep everything as factual as possible wow this is really a good turnout you know I mean the Belmont Stakes is happening right now you could be watching a horse going for the Triple Crown but you're here and I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy Pinball day or a video game day and and joining me so I had a previous slide up here and I changed it but we're gonna get to that later if you were here early enough you saw that slide and what I want to start with is first impressions so in pinball there's there's a lot of first impressions that happen and with the wonderful world of the internet now first impressions can be misleading and so we've we found this to be true because we release a photograph and find out oh they actually do like it once they play the game so anyway without further ado let's talk about these 40 colorful years that I've been through in the pinball business it starts with this wonderful timeline that I've created and again it's stipulated it's from my perspective and my opinions are included I am NOT by any stretch a historian of the pinball industry I never never would call myself a historian I've just been in the middle of it all and it's been a great career so like I said I'm going to talk about first impressions my first impressions of the game business people's first impressions of a pinball machine we're going to get into that and also before I got into the business what made me vibrate what what was it about my life growing up as a kid that got me here because we all know well we all reach an age where we understand that life is not a straight line of plans that all follow through from one to the next thing it's a serendipitous route it's a it's a serpentine route of things that you bump into kind of like a pinball and you find yourself somewhere and and that's kind of I want to get that out to the young people here cuz the younger folks may not understand exactly how things were done back in the day you know the kids always hear oh yeah back in the day well you know there really was back in the day and we did things differently back then so I'm also going to try to cover that so first impressions so I could start by saying the the bar on this picture where's where my parents met and you know or where they had a cocktail let's say the night I was conceived but that's not true it it's it's a bar but the sign on the bar is intriguing because if I could read it with my glasses it says warm beer lousy food and ugly bartenders so to me that's a wonderful sign that's a wonderful piece of marketing to have on the outside of your bar because a guy like me wants to see how ugly the bartender's out how how warm the beer really is and how bad the food is you know it's I want to see all that so to me that's a great first impression so and it goes back to the slide I had on here previously if you walked up and saw that you might say whoa what what the heck is this all about so work about we're going to get to that later also for me the first impressions came in a bar much like that I used to go on vacation of Wisconsin I'm from Chicago and Chicago there was no pinball in Chicago we only made pinball in Chicago but until 1978 pinball was banned in Chicago so all around the suburbs I didn't see pinball I didn't get to play pinball until I went to on vacation with my parents to Wisconsin and it was in bars like that one I showed you that I would see pinball and pitching bats and for me my first impression of the coin op industry was through pitching bats I understood baseball I understood that the ball gets pitched and you hit the ball and a homerun happens or not and that was easily understandable when I played pinball that was a whole different story it was it was tough for me to understand as a kid what exactly was going on with a pinball machine so before I got in the business there was many other people in the business before me and and guys that inspired me guys that I had no idea who they were because nobody had notoriety back in the 40s 50s and 60s it was just guys doing cool stuff on bat glasses and on playfields and their artwork was based on simplicity primary colors a lot of geometry and interesting characters this this was important back then because there was a lot of excuse me just for a minute there's a lot of games being made back in those days because there was no competition for pinball so these guys were cranking out art packages by the week and game designers were cranking out new designs by the week so they had to move quickly and they had to keep things simple but they did an amazing job of keeping that simplicity interesting so when Dennis and I got together and design whoa Nellie Dennis said something very interesting about Roy kurz work he said Greg if you take a look at all of Roy Parker's work everybody in that art work is having fun they're all smiling they're all having a good time and they're there they're just having a good time so he said that should translate then to the people that walk up to the machine for again that first impression to see okay if those people on the back lass and on the playfield are having fun I'm gonna have fun by inserting a coin and playing this game that's the theory right so for a pinball artist that first impression is getting a person to walk across the arcade and place their money in the game to to play the game with whoa Nellie now here's an interesting thing I I wrote at the bottom of Daisy May so obviously we were inspired by Daisy May when we created whoa Nellie we didn't rip it off we didn't lift it we paid homage to a game that to me was really cool that was also paying homage to something else from that time that game was made in July of 1954 hey guess who was born in July of 1954 you know so there you go really weird that the coincidence like that happened but it was our inspiration to kick-start the whoa Nellie project we we got some flack from the Internet when Stern released it and built it for us I won't get into that but in the in the meantime I spent some time trying to figure out how to make whoa Nellie a little more family friendly even though I thought it already was but that's just me so I went in to sales and marketing I said hey if you guys need a package that is totally family friendly I think I got something we haven't yet they haven't said yes to this but I'm just showing it for the first time today just they have some fun because again it's Seattle where the seed for whoa Nellie was planted it's when Dennis and I were here in 2009 got back together and and and so so we take big melons and turn that into huge ginormous melons but now it's strictly about farming it's strictly about raising the biggest melon you can and getting awarded for it so so this is just a really rough sketch that I showed sales and marketing and said hey I can do this if if we need to do this if we need to create a different kind of vibe for this game it's totally doable and we could certainly pull this off so that's that's the back last sketch that I did and then it's probably hard for you to see some of this stuff on the play field but I took out any kind of innuendo I kept things pretty pretty family friendly and very family friendly and but still keeping the same vibe of the game I actually put our fearless leader down at the bottom with his famous huge it's gonna be huge so you know that that's something maybe we could see in the future but I doubt it so for me like I said I didn't get to play pinball until I went to Wisconsin but then it was later when I went to college where I really started discovering pinball and this guy Dave Christensen was my inspiration I was like wow there's people that are actually doing cool artwork on pinball machines and this game wizard was my first impression of my first real impression of what pinball was about pinball graphics the pinball feel and the fact that the who actually you know made a song about pinball was even cooler so this is kind of a mind map of what what made me tick as a kid and what made me excited and and and it you'll see how it leads into everything pinball so of course when I was about three years old Elvis was just getting started and he was on TV and stuff and he inspired me as a three-year-old where my mom would make me get up in front of people and hey do your Elvis and so as early as you know 3 years old I was entertaining and I'll use quotation marks family and friends with my Elvis impersonation drums I discovered drums and fourth grade at about the same time the Beatles hit so I put bring go signature Ludwig set there as another thing that really struck me and has stayed with me my whole life cartoons I I'm the youngest of four children and I'm the youngest by nine years so my older brother is 13 years older than me so some people say I was a mistake I mean some people say I was the baby of the family and others you know use other names for that but anyway being the youngest or being like an only child I had a lot of time on my hands and so I was able to spend a lot of time watching television which was also another form of inspiration Mad Magazine I would go out you know by the time I got to be 12 or so I'd go out and go to the drugstore and buy Mad Magazine and my mom didn't know I was buying it I brought it home and would hide it because if she saw it she'd throw it right in the garbage but you know I again totally inspired by Mad Frankenstein the the whole universal monster thing I think a lot of us can all you know share the same feel for you know all of this back in the day I still have my original Frankenstein Aurora model not in box I built it and painted it fairly okay back back then Three Stooges big big influence on me and of course the weirdos by Big Daddy had Roth and all those guys the huge inspiration I made every model kit I loved all that stuff it was just so bizarre and so strange and my mother would be like can't you find something better to do with your time and I'm like I'm doing it right here so anyway and this guy down at the bottom I'll introduce him later that bug-eyed again a break so this is an interesting another mind map that will take you further into where my brain started and how it developed towards pinball so in the lower right hand corner that's my mom my mom is going to be 90s 98 years old this year up until she was about 90 which is when this picture was taken she was still doing art work every day I didn't know when I was a kid that my mom was an artist she was a photographer by the time I got to know her and unfortunately I was the subject of a lot of that photography unwilling photography mind you here Greg put this costume on we're gonna go out to the woods and take pictures great so my mom was a huge inspiration but I didn't know she was an artist so it wasn't until later that I found out that she had these mad skills now the the here's the interesting thing she has Alzheimer's the pieces that are behind her are some of the last pieces she did with fully developed Alzheimer's and it's interesting to see her work some would say well it's really degraded from what she was capable of doing but I see it differently I see some really interesting just you know simple shapes going back to that simplistic design philosophy and if you look at it the right way it takes on a whole different vibe of how she was starting to see things through the haze of both cataracts and Alzheimer's but she was still determined to get that hand to do what she wanted it to do so again inspiring me up up through you know current day the picture above that is is a picture of a drawing from like a biology class my older sister was in high school when I was very little and she would bring these drawings home from biology class that were very intricate and stippled and it was what she saw in the microscope when she was looking through the microscope and I was like wow that's cool you go to biology class and you can draw and I never made the connection until much later that that inspired me to become an artist it's like I must like biology because I like to draw so we'll learn more about that in a minute this toy over on the left that was the coolest Christmas present I could have ever received my parents got me that it was literally a light table and who knew years later I'd be slaving over light tables like crazy tracing and drawing things for a living but that thing it was a cartoon maker and I could I could mix and match you know heads and bodies and and draw whatever was on their you know cheat sheets that they gave you or I could start making up my own stuff so that that toy would like you know get retired and come back out of retirement and go back in retirement it was just a great toy to have and it was more than a toy really the beetles like I said earlier the beetles were a huge influence not only on me of course on everybody at least most everybody and and they're their influence they're their uniqueness really stuck with me and made me realize that if you do something in art you you can try to make it your own as best as you can so I've learned a lot from from that okay the white rat here's an interesting story my same sister that had biology class in high school got a job at GD Cyrille it's a drug company because they were right down the street in Skokie Illinois and she got a job without any college credit working in the biology lab there and she worked on animals every day experimenting as she was told to do and one of the things that she had to do was castrate rats and she felt bad for them but it was her job and it was probably 1965 or something like that so she went to work every day and experimented on animals not knowing exactly where there was experiments were leading to because she was just part of the cog in the machine but she would bring home she would sneak home Oh a white rat that she had castrated and unbeknownst to me the castration process leads to a much larger animal so I would have these giant white rats in my possession and they were they were fun to play with but and that was before Willard so it wasn't weird it wasn't weird at all so anyway just showing you a more inspiration of where all this led to so in a high school so the young people that are out here like I said high school is what it is you you learn stuff it's it's important to do your work and stay focused and get to college and all that stuff you know it is important but when you're there it sure doesn't feel important so to me art classes in high school or for burnouts greasers low lifes ne'er-do-wells drug dealers thugs cheerleaders and random strange Rangers and I apologize to any cheerleaders in the crowd but they it was where people went to avoid taking real classes in my opinion so I didn't do that I took algebra and trig and analytical geometry and a precalculus and biology I took biology because hey I like to draw and physics and chemistry and and all that good stuff because I wanted to go to college and I thought well if I like biology and I'm gonna do something in college with biology then I better take all these classes so I did but I also took and orchestra percussion lessons and film study now this film study it was intriguing because it it it brought out a different side of me that I wasn't quite aware was there I just thought wow this could this could be cool so my biggest accomplishments in high school ironically were not through biology or chemistry or anything like that my biggest accomplishments were I shot and edited an 8 millimeter film for film study and got a really good grade I helped others shoot and edit 8 millimeter film projects because they saw what I did and said hey can you help us do that yeah I can and I played in to rock-and-roll bands for money now that's the important part a lot of people can play in rock and roll bands and never make a dime but since sixth grade I had been making money playing drums so you know that's important because if you if you choose an art you might want to make some money with it eventually so I try to tell that to my daughters one of them got it and one of them didn't but she's doing just fine anyway but I did like to draw in high school I would go home and on weekends I would set up a still life I'd throw an old gym shoe up there and a couple of other things and and just spend my time learning teaching myself how to draw so it did happen eventually so now I get to college and you know I'm I'm all about the biology thing first two years two years of four years two years was in biology I thought I was going to be pre-vet I wanted to be a veterinarian because I wanted to help animals I didn't want to experiment on them like my sister did I wanted to help them and make them well again but I found out a lot of things real quickly and one of them was you know once you go from studying single-cell amoebas and planaria you know that fun stuff now you have to start studying harder stuff like genetics and I learned that genetics was the weeding class this is the class in college that you take to find out if you truly have what it takes to continue on in that field and for me genetics the basic level genetics class was the weeding class for me I had an experiment with Drosophila the famous fruit fly and and I had to put the dress off of the Drosophila in a jar and make sure it got enough ether in there to kill a bunch of them so I could look at them through a microscope and look at their vestigial wings or their red eyes of their white eyes and my Drosophila group ended up all over the lab and so I failed miserably on that experiment because I couldn't even get them under the microscope to do my job so so that didn't help anything that was the first step of my step towards not being a biology major my second step is when I got to I sorry when I got pissed actually I didn't get to the Frog got tooth so does anybody know what pithing is all right so I didn't know and when they told us we had to do this maneuver right here I was like you're kidding me and this was unlike something that my sister did back in you know professionally and and I hated it I hated it I had to do it we did it and it and you learned about the nervous system and you know the anatomy of the brain and yeah yeah yeah and that's that was the second step that started me thinking maybe biology is not for me and the third step the the third shoe to drop so to speak was when we came into biology lab and we got this proposed to us do we have any volunteers and everybody was like no and so we were like well why why well we're gonna study under a microscope and everybody said well how do you do it and then he was like you'll find out when you get there so anyway I walked or ran immediately to my counselor and said I think I'm gonna switch majors and he said why is that and I said well and I told him about the last slide and he said oh okay that could that could be a problem all right so what comes with switching majors a phone call home self-doubt and a lot of catch-up time so like I said I didn't take any art classes in high school so I felt like everybody that was two years into their art major was way ahead of me yeah I called home and fortunately my mother was very open minded about this because she was an artist and they were shocked that I was changing majors and she goes well what do you think you're gonna do with that major and I said well I'm gonna get a job as an artist you know a commercial artist somewhere hopefully and she goes well you know our neighbor is a commercial artist and you know I said yeah and he lives on the park mom he must do pretty good you know because he's right across from the park so anyway we had that discussion and I was fearful of the catch-up time right I knew I was going to be working my butt off to catch up to everybody else but it had to be done the other thing is I was at a four-year university I didn't understand the difference between illustration and fine art and our professors pushed the further fine art they they said illustration that's that's minor-league you know you don't want to think about that you want to you want to raise your look your lofty goals to fine art because as my watercolor teacher told us the artists are the minstrels of the and so you want it you want to focus your talent towards that community as like wow okay that's one way to think about it but I want to illustrate so we would have debates all the time I finally fell into the fine art care category and started doing fine art and started entering it in fine art contests and started winning awards for things like this and I was like really befuddled because what what is it about that that somebody saw that gave me a purchase award for that I just didn't understand I didn't get what I was supposed to be doing as a fine artist because I wanted to represent things I wanted to create art that people could appreciate and I didn't get the fine art aspect and when I when I was there for you know the first year of my major my junior year of college I thought maybe I should you know switch to an art school so that I could learn illustration firsthand rather than trying to ride this out as a fine artist and then switching to illustration so you know we all have our shoulda woulda coulda moments in life and for me I could have gone you know cuz it was right in my backyard in Chicago to the American Academy of Fine Art where this guy Alex Ross went or this guy Thomas Blackshear went or this guy Haydon son bloom went or this guy Gil Elvgren went but no I went where this guy went and I never saw him after I let him out of that jar so but the key to getting into the business was not through my major as much as it was through my minor I found out that there was a minor program over in the in the industrial education and technology department that had a graphics program where you could learn how to print how to silkscreen how to create half-tones how to do for color separation all these behind the scenes things that I never knew about but hey if you miner that that might help you with your major so I did and that was the key that unlocked the door for me to get into the business so my first job out of college was working for in point of purchase advertising I got a job near my house for a very respected company in that in that field and the first things that I was asked these these questions up on the board are the first three questions that came up within the first two weeks of my employment the first question was where do you hang the broom the second one was why didn't you go to art school and the third one was you know I can get you fired so those three questions were thrown at me in the first two weeks of employment where do I hang the broom I don't even know what that means I thought the guy and he had a suit on you know he had a three-piece suit on and he was older and I'm like I just looked at him and I thought wow am I supposed to be sweeping the floor - I didn't know and so I went home that night and said hey Dad if somebody asked you where do you hang the broom he goes he's asking you where you live I was like oh I didn't know that so went back the next day and told him I live in Skokie so I got that question answered but the other - why didn't you go to art school well I was already where I was and and then that followed with well you know I can get you fired because I didn't hire you but you should have gone to art school like I did I was like oh okay but again back to my minor industrial education and technology I ended up in the darkroom I ended up in the dark hey about that and and I learned about more about the darkroom experience and and and that helped because later I met Kevin O'Connor and I call it the Kevin connection Kevin is also a very famous pinball artist that preceded me by about six months in the business he called me I could I worked with him and the point of purchase advertising company for about six months he got a job at Bally you know the the the real Bali you know on Belmont Avenue in Chicago and he called me six months later and he goes they're hiring get your portfolio together I can get you in here I was like okay so I worked really hard for about three weeks and got an interview with Paul Faris Paul Faris was the art director at Bally back when I joined them and he looked at my work and I you know it was mostly fine art but I had done some special pieces that were more illustrative something that would be more pinball dynamic and he looked at those and he goes you know what I'm gonna give you a test I'm gonna give you one week and not the Barenaked Ladies version of one week but I want I want you to take one week and come up with something that looks like a pinball backlash so I went back home and worked until 3:00 in the morning every night got about four hours of sleep went to my day job and went home at night for a week and worked on summertime and it was it was you know I didn't know what they were gonna think of it I just did it it's they didn't give me any direction it was just like do what you want and and that's what I worked on interestingly enough part of this inspired skate ball later on because skate ball was the first illustration I did for a back glass at Bali and and the van is leftover remnants from from summertime that made it onto the back glass of skate ball and and who knew back in the day way before my time that there was a summertime pinball machine so anyway on 6:12 1978 hey that's like next week I landed the gig at Bali and Bali became Bally Midway and Bally Midway became Williams over the next twenty years or so twenty-one years excuse me so getting in Bali was important obviously and when I told Paul Faris I had darkroom experience he stood up out of his desk he goes why didn't you say that in the first place and I said why I didn't know if it was going to be important here he goes I'm setting up a complete darkroom with a processor film processor and we're we're gonna keep a lot more of that work in-house so you can help me set that up and get it up and running and I said yes I can so that's what really got me in the door at Bali but for the next ten years or so it was I call it the the first five years was like Bali Hai for me I was just on a complete hi couldn't believe I was working next to guys like Paul Faris and Dave Christensen and you know just just a kid you know just a couple years out of college and and having the time of my life it was it was so cool to be able to have the freedom to do kind of what we wanted to do at that time on themes that were somewhere licensed like the Harlem Globetrotters and rolling stones and others were just off the top of the head so I put black pyramid on here because up until black pyramid that was the high part of things that's that's when things were on a roll but slowly pinball declined and we got into the the lower portions but I just want to go back to the art department we've made we we stayed lifelong friends Kevin O'Connor Pat McMahon Margaret Hudson Paul Faris it's like a fraternity that I never thought I'd want to be in but I I never wasn't a fraternity but this is the best fraternity I could have ever been in and and we've remained good friends for up throughout the years we just got together last summer with Tony Ramon II another you know guy that did the first black night backless and art package he lives in back in Italy now and so we still get together when we can and talk about the old days and talk about new times too so I'm gonna I'm gonna get to see Tony this week coming up the Bally Midway I call this the low period for me again these are my opinions but it's when pinball started to wane and and video games took off like a shot and then even video games started to settle down with the advent of laserdisc games and all those fun things so black pyramid was like a high point and then it kind of came down from there I've mentioned this in other talks Hardbody was not a happy moment for me hard body was forced upon me by corporate because Bali had just bought health clubs Chicago health clubs and Rachel McLeish well as the spokesperson for Chicago health clubs and the the guys were like okay the guys meaning their suits were like okay we're gonna do a game that supports the health clubs so we're gonna do a weightlifting game a bodybuilding game and I was like oh really and we're gonna do a photograph on the back glass no all right I bought a tooth and nail that I lost but fortunately it was the only photographic back glass that Bally ever did so let's hear it for that right thank you thank you I'll take that but the other cool thing is in this low period I also met and worked with Dan Langlois Dan was a young designer that was brought in to kind of shake things up and bring new ideas to the play field and and he did and some were very experimental most were very so black belt which I saw one here today strange science lost escape from the lost world were all day in Stephen Lang law I games where he was really working outside the box and creating a new vibe for pinball and it started you know cuz we were going up against Williams high speed we had to you know battle Steve Ritchie himself and come up with something that would grab attention compared to what he was doing so I thought strange science was interesting and and it got some attention at the show that it went to and then the next stage of my career was Williams where this this was a major this was even higher than the Bally high as far as creativity this is where we really came into our own and and and Williams gave a lot of freedom to the design teams by bringing the Bally team in together with the Williams team it created a real rivalry there was a lot of competition between teams and it was it was a pretty cool work environment the Richie brothers on one side and Nordmann and and ever you know everybody else just you know working together but working competitively to do the next best thing Dennis and I kind of approached it like hey let's say have fun with us you know let's let's not be so serious let's let's really have fun with what we do so games like party zone and talk to dude and the elvira games you know we were we were just having fun and and I think it shows you know those games are unique to what they are they weren't huge sellers at the time but they they were what they were and they've stood the test of time I still get people coming up going hey doctor dude is just such a weird amazing game you know thanks for thanks for putting that thing together you know I got to work with Steve on Star Trek next gen that that was where Steve said I want to work with you but I don't want any funny stuff on the game so I said don't worry Steve Star Trek is not very funny and again you know lifelong friends we built great relationships with each other and you know we got to meet famous people always good okay I can't say enough about everybody that we've worked with and it is a team effort you know it's a it's always a team effort this is this is another transitional period in my career I call it Midway again because after Bali are after Williams closed it's pinball doors I ended up at Midway doing touch screen games art directing for those and then I worked on to Xbox and PlayStation games one called psyops the mind gate conspiracy and the other was a game with John Woo the famous film director called stranglehold each one of those games took three years in development which was really outside the box outside the the thought of how fast games really should develop because in pinball it takes about a year to velop develop a game and to work on something for three years is extraordinary and hard to fathom so that guy at the bottom there that's a fish out of water that was me and then unemployment struck in 2008 and I was 50 something at the time with two kids in college and I went through a resume building seminar at the library and the 31 year old guy maybe said you sir are highly specialized and I said thank you I realized that so so much for a resume building right he said oh by the way you should only put the last ten years on your resume I said what if I don't want to do what I did for the last ten years yeah I doesn't work you know so anyway it was time for reinvention I came to Seattle and the rest is history I got together with Dennis we created whoa Nelly we met Jersey jack I worked with Jersey jack on his first game I you know it's all been an amazing serendipitous path from from here to there but you know that's where I ended up as a freelancer working working with Jack and a bunch of other game companies and including Stern I did I did help Stern in the freelance era but I also built the whiz-bang company with Dennis and whoa Nelly got us at least a foot in the door back at stern I'm going to show some stuff that I've never showed before this is a beer label of one of our programmers from Williams Tom you man when he stopped programming ended up working or starting a brewery and and so he wanted to brew beer his whole life and he took that opportunity and created a brewery and I started doing label art for him so this is a more finished piece I did for a piece that he called first ascent his avocation is rock climbing he loves rock climbing and so his whole thing in starting this brewery was he wanted to give it a rock climbing theme so first ascent was his first brew that he concocted and I I did the label art for it and I handled it like a pinball back glass but I forgot that the label was going to be that big so there's a lot of detail on this thing and and I worked large enough that I could blow it up poster size and you could see all that fine detail down on the ground there but it's I I tackled it more like like a pinball machine probably shouldn't have I also did a rough sketch for him of a bunch a bunch of monkeys for a game a game beer that he called rose shampoo which is rock paper scissors and so I did the monkeys you know see here no evil see no evil and turn them into Roe shampoo and I gave him a rough sketch and he goes okay great thank you I said whoa whoa whoa he goes what I said I'm not done those are rough sketches he goes no they're not I'm gonna print these I said no you're not and he goes yeah I am and so my rough sketches became final art which I wasn't really happy about but he liked it so he was the client and that was another lesson I learned in the freelance business these are through Tom I met another Brewer but she was brewing a liquor she was a distiller so she was out in Colorado and her avocation was whitewater rafting so she she wanted to develop her work based on whitewater and and that kind of stuff but she liked the pinball graphics and she wanted to create characters that had a pinball vibe to him so I worked with her for a couple years all right so I'm gonna take a real turn here how much time do I left it's 4:14 I don't have much time right so I'm gonna go through this pretty quickly but for the younger people out here I do everything on a Cintiq tablet now I take a stylus and I work directly on a computer and and it creates the artwork that I that I want to create much like the artwork that I created before computers came along so those are what we call real art tools that is a myriad of brushes pencils magic markers and by the way magic markers were made out of a glass tube and we learned from Paul Faris the hard way that if you get mad enough at the work that you're doing and throw the magic marker against the wall it will break and leave a nice color spot on the wall so we we came in one morning and we were like hey Paul J have a bad night last night and he was like yeah get out of here so anyway we used real tools I put Lucy up here because this contraption was called a Lucy and all it was meant to do was take a sketch it was an opaque projector you'd poke your sketch up here and if you wanted to enlarge that sketch it would be projected down here and you would retrace painstakingly the sketch onto tracing paper so that you'd have a bigger version of it so we used Lucy's and and it all started with thumbnail pencil thumbnails and moving on too tight sketches and marker comps so that eventually it would lead to Ruby lifts film and printing there was all the stages this is kind of a you know if you read down from the top that's the stages of development that we go through so I'm trying to move this through this as quickly as possible the Ruby lift film Ruby lift was a substrate whereby you would cut with a exacto blade and peel off what you didn't want the print and leave what you did want a print and then that would be converted into a film positive which would then be burned into a silkscreen which would then be printed now there's probably Marc Silk screeners out here gone now Gregg that's not exactly well I covered that briefly just to get through this but it's a lot of work and it's a lot of effort by a lot of people when I did one le I wanted to keep it true to the old school vibe so I did it old school I did each layer as a separate color so there was 11 colors on this whoa Nellie playfield that all had to register to each other and line up so they all printed to make it look like a continuous image illustrations with paint we actually used paint with air brushes and and all sorts of brushes and we also call this continuous tone like a photograph it's continuous tone meaning that the color is is full color and just to show you when you go when you take a walk out onto the floor out here you'll see the older games our line art you know a an ink drawing filled in with solid colors or tones of colors to create pseudo gradations whereas a painting is reproduced the photo mechanically and printed via a series of dots CMYK cyan magenta black and yellow on to whatever substrate you needed printed on so I'm showing two pieces of my work that show off line art versus continuous tone or painting same with Paul Faris he did line art early on and then he implemented a four-color process onto our back glasses and and was able to convince the higher-ups at bally that we needed to do continuous tone to make our games look like they were album covers rather than pinball machines Wow that doesn't make sense so here's just some views of scared stiff as thumbnails you know I got to start somewhere right and you just start putting ideas down on paper this is a pencil sketch that I hand it off to John Yousi to finish the back glass so I designed the layout with the castle in the background gave it to John and we gave him a list of sight gags and said have at it and make it cool and he did this is a tight ink drawing that I did for for party zone and with that I did a comic book style of fill from from that ink drawing and and did a blue line transfer s is another thing you take your ink drawing you give it to a company that does a blue line transfer very very much part of the comic book industry and it leaves a blue line that doesn't get photographed but you can paint right on top of that blue line and then marry it with the ink drawing and that's this is the comic book style color of the fill that would then you know be married to the the ink drawing to create the final product for parties own sometimes I did pencil sketches underneath the painting to create value in tone and give me myself a base to work from illustrations with paint this is a lot of people feel this is one of my best pieces and thank you I it's it's not the style that I use currently but definitely I think I was maybe 26 when I did that so I've learned a few things since then back in the day stenciled cabinets you gave the stencil maker a piece of art that they could then turn into stencils and spray paint on cabinets Paul Faris took that to extremes with the way he handled centaur but by the time we got into the 80s and 90s we were able to are actually closer to the 90s we were able to print directly on the cabinet with maybe up to six colors line art and then later on full-color process like medieval madness we started using the Mac in the early 90s there was one Macintosh in our computer in our art department for a bunch of people and we all got to share that one Macintosh to make sure that this was something that we should be investing in some of us were early adopters and others weren't so taking this to the extreme my last piece of real art that I call real art was revenge from Mars the back glass and my first all computer developed art was whoa Nelly so that shows that computer developed art can look similar to real painted art today's workflow at at I'm currently the art director it's thern pinball so there are two in-house artist myself and Steven Martin and my part of my job is finding the right talent getting the right guys attached to the right job I think we're doing okay so far in that department with guys like you know Christopher Franchi and and zombie Yeti and dirty Donnie who knew you had to have a stage name i-i never acquired one but it's never too late maybe i'll come up with one so Steven Steven and I Steven Martin and I are kind of like traffic cops and we just make sure the work flow continues gets done on time on budget and it gets through the system this list of people in the middle are all the guys that have done work for stern pinball within the last year part of that was because of Star Wars Star Wars we needed to get that job done on time so Lucas stepped in and said we can give you a list of guys that you can go to and they're already sanctioned artists we'll still have to approve their artwork when they're done with it but at least it'll give you more people to choose from so part of my jobs and art directors to make sure that the three games of Star Wars that we produced all looked like they came from one hand or one brain and I hope we were successful in that I feel we were we had Bob Steph llyich our local artist in Chicago did a great job of doing all the layout work for all the games including the play field so I think Bob did a great job of dealing with the license or and getting those rough layouts to a stage where they could approve it to go to final color and then the other guys stepped in to do all the final color work including Bob himself this is just a picture we took at mgc last year I call it the bullpen and the coach so you know the younger talent is is there they're happening they're good guys they know what they're doing and I just kind of coach him along and help him through any rough spots so that's dirty Donnie and zombie Eddie if you've never seen those guys before zombie Eddie also known as Jeremy pecker and that's Steven Martin not to be confused with Steve Martin and myself having a beverage at Expo a few years ago Steve has been incredible he's never seen never been interested in pinball before but he's fully developed into a great production support artist and he gets a lot of stuff done on a daily basis anyway I just want to thank you all for hanging out here and listening to this neverending story I want to thank you for helping me support my family throughout the years because you're you're the people that support the industry support the game and support the sport because it is becoming a sport as we know there's a lot of competitors out there so thanks to the North West guys that throw this show Mike for doing a great job here with the microphone and the video stuff Jerry forget me out here and doing the poster this year there are posters available out there so if you got anything to sign I can I can take the time after this and sign anything you need me to sign but thank you again I really appreciate it from my heart thanks again any quick questions do we have time for like any quick questions if you got them five five minutes right there go sure yeah it's it it varies so the question was if you couldn't hear him the is the storyline developed by the artist or via the the game direction and really the the that changes with every game obviously licenses are different licenses kind of drive the storyline but but the game team will you know like Dwight and Steve Ritchie worked with Star Wars to develop the storyline for the game based on the movies of course but a game like doctor dude Dennis wanted to do a comic book theme he wanted to do Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles he wanted to get that license and I said we could do our own you know so that particular game was driven by the storyline that that I wrote for the idea of taking you know about a mash-up of ideas again from my past you know the Nutty Professor and and stuff like that and turning it into a weird concoction of you know what it takes to be cool when you play pinball you know so you know it's really it's really driven by each individual project it's it's not a it's not a hard and fast rule that the storyline is developed by the game designer or by the artist it's it's and especially in this day and age it's more of a team effort way back in the day when the game designs came from game design and came to the art department and said okay they need artwork now there was less interaction between the game designer and the artist especially again if there was a license attached but you know like a game like frontier I'll use an example of one of my own games our marketing chief was a woman that was married to the guy that photographed our games she said my husband is a dead ringer for you know Grizzly Adams would you could we do a game that's kind of a Grizzly Adams knockoff and and create something with him on it and so we talked about it and everybody agreed yeah he sure does look like Grizzly Adams so he sent me all these gorgeous photographs of himself on like a rig that made him look like he was up on a horse getting attacked by a wolf and and I had great reference art to work from and created you know the backlash from that so you know there was a fact that marketing took an idea that was a knockoff of a potential license and we just turned it into something because her husband wanted to be on a pinball machine so anybody else yeah you're welcome one more right right that's a complex question but in you know currently our our screen graphics need a lot more love than dot matrix dot make sure I'm not downplaying dot matrix because it's that was a difficult medium to work in and guys like Mark Galvez and and all those guys did a wonderful job with what they had to work with but but people expect more now you know and and and Jack made the first step into that realm and and Stern has followed and and learned from and I was there when when Jack started the screen graphics and I was instrumental in bringing JP to the to work for Jack and JP is done nice work for him but with that said yes we do much more sculpting work now for the toys we we even back in the 90s we had to bring in sculptors two sculptors to work on the castle for medieval madness are the trolls or whatever the case may be we we would do sketches and hand it off to a sculptor and they would have to work within the parameter of the mechanical engineer so that you know it had to be cut this way it had to be a facade here you know it had to cover this completely and they would be given all those dimensions and and of course now we've got you know 3d art showing up on screen not being driven as 3d art because we don't have the processing power to do that but being played back as an avi or whatever the format to create the illusion that you know Iron Maiden is a good example of moving in that direction so it is much more complicated now than it was in the past there's there's a lot more I could say about that but you know I don't I don't know if that really answered anything but we could talk about it later hey I think we're done I think we're wrapped so thanks again thanks for sticking around
high confidence · Greg Ferrer revealing personal connection to game inspiration
“We had to battle Steve Ritchie himself and come up with something that would grab attention compared to what he was doing.”
Greg Ferrer @ late Bally period — Indicates competitive pressure from Williams and respect for rival designer Steve Ritchie
high · Greg's timeline visualization placing Black Pyramid as peak, followed by declining creative opportunities; competition with Steve Ritchie's Williams games requiring innovation to stay relevant
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product_concern: Hardbody was a contentious project where corporate mandate (using Rachel McLish photograph for newly acquired health club brand tie-in) conflicted with Greg's artistic vision and sensibilities.
high · Greg: 'Hardbody was forced upon me by corporate...I bought a tooth and nail that I lost...fortunately it was the only photographic backglass that Bally ever did'
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community_signal: Bally art department formed a tight-knit community that remained connected across decades; lifelong friendships between Kevin O'Connor, Pat McMahon, Margaret Hudson, Paul Faris, and Greg Ferrer.
high · Greg: 'we stayed lifelong friends...Tony Ramone...we still get together when we can and talk about the old days...this is the best fraternity I could have ever been in'
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design_innovation: Dan Langlois brought experimental, outside-the-box playfield design to Bally games (Black Belt, Strange Science, Lost, Escape from the Lost World), representing a design innovation response to Williams' competitive pressure.
high · Greg: 'Dan was a young designer brought in to shake things up...he was really working outside the box...we had to battle Steve Ritchie himself and come up with something that would grab attention'
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manufacturing_signal: Bally set up in-house darkroom operations for film processing and color separation work during the late 1970s, indicating vertical integration of artwork production.
high · Paul Faris: 'I'm setting up a complete darkroom with a processor...we're gonna keep a lot more of that work in-house'
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content_signal: Greg Ferrer delivering a comprehensive career retrospective presentation at an event (Wedgehead Pinball Podcast), indicating growing interest in pinball history and industry personalities.
high · Episode title and format; Greg acknowledges audience and event attendance (Belmont Stakes reference to Seattle location)
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product_strategy: American Pinball explored creating a family-friendly variant of Whoa Nellie with alternative backglass and playfield artwork, suggesting market segmentation strategy for different venue/audience demographics.
medium · Greg showing rough sketch: 'I went in to sales and marketing and said if you guys need a package that is totally family friendly...strictly about farming...I did and then it's probably hard for you to see some of this stuff on the play field but I took out any kind of innuendo'