Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast hosted by me, Alan, one of the owners of Wedgehead, a pinball bar in Portland, Oregon, joined in the basement studio with my co-host, as usual, Alex the Waterboy. How are you doing? I'm doing great, Alan. How about you? Pretty good. You know what would make us do even better, though, is if our faithful listeners of the show went to coffee.com slash Wedgehead podcast and donated to our fundraiser. We're raising money to go. So we did one of these going to Boston. That's happening very shortly after we record this episode, actually. By the time you listen, we'll have already been there. And we're going again to see some friends in Colorado in the pinball scene, check out some of those spots, just kind of see some stuff around Denver. Denver, Pueblo, tell us where we need to go. We're very excited. Alex has drawn some limited edition Floopy Drooper stickers, Rocky Mountain High version, and we're excited to see y'all in Colorado. Yes, once we have dates picked out, we'll let everybody know. So if you want to meet us up somewhere, we definitely can arrange that. But anyway, that's not why we're actually here today. We're here today to talk about, you know, a very important topic in the hobby, and that's starting a rural pinball scene. You know, like, fucking Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. And nobody knows that better than our guest, Marcus. Marcus, how are you doing? Great. How you doing, fellas? Very, very good. Excited to talk to you, Marcus. I know this has been a long time coming. We've, we got backed up with the show, and I'm glad we're finally getting to talk now. So. One thing about rural community is that you're not in a hurry to do much. That's good. So give the listener a little overview on like how you became a pinball operator. Okay. Well, I mean, I fell in love with pinball back in like 07, 08 when I was in the Bay area. Ended up moving up here with my wife into a small town. It's actually like 9,000 people. But the sign says like 17,000 when you come into town. But that's because at the time they had 8,000 inmates in the prisons and they counted them in the population. Oh, wow. So really there's only 9,000 in the town and there's like 25,000 in the whole county. So it was a small town. I figured I love playing league. League got me just hooked into pinball and played some tournaments for a while. But I thought my pinball playing days were over other than having a few machines in my garage. Yeah, that's where it ends for most people when you move to a small town. Right. And what made you go, this is going to be different? Like I'm going to create a scene out here in a small town in Susanville, California. Well, I sort of backed into it. I mean, there was one dive bar on Main Street. There's pretty much all the businesses are on Main Street. It's kind of a place to drive through. I just asked the owner one time, I was like, hey, you ought to have a pinball in here. And they're like, pinball? And I'm like, yeah, pinball. He's like, I know those. I'm like, yeah, you should. It'd do great in here. And so I got an old beat up earth shaker because I didn't know how I was going to get treated and put it in there. It had a basement and it had this whole wood floor and like Earthshaker would go and the whole bar would just rumble. It was great. That's the kind of game you need to get some attention. Yeah, it started there and it did okay. And I actually ran a couple of tournaments. I brought a few more games in and the first tournament did pretty good. But the bar scene, I did another tournament a couple of months later and it was like eight people. It wasn't catching on real well. So I was like, well, whatever. I'll just leave the Earthshaker in there. and let it ride. Then a game shop opened up. And of course, in small town, everybody knows each other. And so the bartender told the guy who was opening the game shop, he's like, hey, there's this dude who's got pinball. You ought to have pinball in your game shop. And so he came over to my house and I had about, I don't know, maybe 15 games at the time in my garage. He's like, dude, could you make my game shop look like your garage? He thought, oh, some guy with pinball you know, in Susanville, oh, there's probably a couple of dusty machines with a bunch of boxes all over them in the corner that don't work, you know, but all my stuff was up running, looking beautiful. And he was like, wow. So it kind of started there. I started putting games in his game shop and then COVID hit. And then my wife's a doctor. And so all the high schoolers were going into her to get, to get antidepressants because all the extracurriculars got, you know, canceled and the kids had nothing to do. So they were getting depressed. She's like, you got to do something, Marcus. And so I'm like, all right, pinball league, high schoolers, let's go. And so I had a high schooler pinball league. I was like, well, let's do it. And so I got like, I don't know, 12, 15 kids. That's a good turnout. Yeah. I got it up to five machines. I got a new Deadpool pro in there and kind of games from all eras. The kids liked it and they did a couple seasons of it. But then like the parents were like, where's our league? I'm like, what? Yeah. When I say parents, I mean like pretty much one lady. Yeah, it still counts. Yeah, it still counted. I was like, well, maybe there's hope. Well, sometimes just one word of encouragement is enough to spark, hey, you want it? I'm going to bring it. You were already ready to do it. You were already ready to do it. And then she was like, I would come. And you're like, all right, done. Let's do this. Yeah. It's just like the guy at the game shop saying, put games in. It's like, dude, you just asked the wrong guy or the right guy, really, because you just asked an addict to go buy more machines. And it's a built-in excuse because they're going to make money. See, that's how you sell it to the wife. Yeah, it's the perfect plan. Exactly. So, yeah, now I have, what, 41, 40, I don't know, 42 machines. And how many do you keep at the – how big is the location now? How many games are there at any given point? Just a rough estimate. I got two locations now. I'm about to open a third. Oh, wow. I think 17 at the game zone. There's a little town of like 2000 people, like 15 minutes south that I have five machines on. They do a weekly league down there or weekly tournament down there. And then there's a local brewery, a micro brewery that does pizzas and stuff. And they just asked me to start bringing in four machines. So now the addiction. it's spreading dude the disease John Youssi what you've done that's kind of insane when they start coming to you and being like hey we want games as an operator that's i mean i know you're not doing this as a full-time job but that's like the best thing possible is when people come to you you're like oh freebie yeah yeah you usually have to do a lot of legwork at first to get your first locations but then you became the guy you know marcus is the guy in northern california like you're the guy so that's pretty cool but we want to talk about like building this scene because i I think there are some listeners out there that were in your situation kind of precisely because I hear about this all the time. It's like surprisingly common sentiment is that people are like, well, I'd love to play pinball on location, but like there's just none around me. I just have to play these games in my garage. And a lot of the guys in these small cities, you'll be, you know, middle aged guys that played pinball as a kid or whatever. They got into it back as adults and they built out a collection, but that's it. And they don't have any other friends in the area that play pinball. They're the pinball guy. It's kind of like you when you moved there. And so that's why we're interested in talking to you. and kind of hearing your advice for how you did this and like kind of what you think were like the key pieces to your success. Like I say, I kind of backed into this. I wanted to be in the league. I love playing in league, you know, a little less competitive, a little bit of competition, maybe at the end for finals or something. But just hanging out with people and playing pinball is way more fun than playing by yourself. The first thing you got to do, I found out though, is you definitely want to have a public location. Yes. You got to have access. Yeah. I mean, you can invite people over your house and they might have fun. you might have a couple of fun nights playing pinball, but it's like trying to get a bunch of people, a whole group of people to come at the same time to a house is a different vibe than if you have it out on location at a public place. 100%. So how do you find a location? Because it says here, you say, find a business owner you can trust. You really do want to have good trust with the owner. They insure the machines. I have them insure the machines. Right. So I don't have to take on that cost. And it's like, you have to trust the guy that he's actually putting it on their insurance right right totally yeah that's like the scary part like you said with your first earth shaker you kind of you like you put your toes in the water and you're like i got a beat up earth shaker because you don't know how it's going to get like played you don't know what's going to happen to it it's scary they're even cheap pinball machines are expensive so i can always understand people being scared to put their personal games out in public because you don't know how it's going to go i i'm always trying to tell people the opposite where i'm like it wherever you're at these machines were made to be put on location so put them on location it's sort of like you know it's like having a wild animal in your house as a pet you're like you can have this falcon dude but that falcon should be outside yeah but it doesn't make sense like what if someone's mean to it like i'm just like they'll do fine out there they're a fucking falcon you know they got big talents and shit but i understand how that's like at first for a lot of home collectors like they're just like oh my god i can't even fathom that that's the scary bridge to cross i think it It was a little easier for me because I came into the hobby from the operating side somehow. Yeah. Because I bought my first pinball machine specifically to put on location. Yeah, you bought it with the expectation to put. So it's like I've kind of, it's like it's a commercial, like that's why you're buying commercial games. That's what's cool about them. But it is, you still, you 100% do need to get somebody you trust. Because the next thing you have on this list here, Marcus, is care for the machines. I agree completely with this. I'm like, there's no reason to do it unless you're committed to doing it right. Absolutely. And that's where you guys, your podcast is beautiful about addressing that issue. I love it. The fears about them games getting beat up are way more than what actually happens. That I can tell everybody. 100%. They're 100% made to be in the wild and they do just fine. I really, I've even purchased routed games. Oh, don't buy a routed game. I know. And it's like, dude, the routed game is like in beautiful condition. like somebody is loving on that thing and it's better condition than h home use only ones right so it's like it's all about the care that's been gone into it 100 and everything that can happen to a game other than decades of neglect anything that happens to a game in under 10 years can be undone in like a day of like cleaning and maintenance cleaning and shopping the game out maybe more than i always think about it like i would much rather buy a game from an operator i trust and respect than from a random home collect i'm gonna say this and i'm not gonna get too specific but sometimes when i go to a pinball show and i play a home collector game i look at a game that somebody put untold amounts of thousands of dollars worth of mods into uh and whatever bullshit into and then i go to flip the game and the flippers are fucking weak and can't make a rant and i'm like crap flips like shit plays like shit right like and you're like damn dude like you spent all the money and time on the wrong shit like this game plays like crap like i don't get it and the thing is is like as a good operator you would have a player that would come in and go this flippers week what the hell but as a as a home collector putting all these mods in you don't realize that the game plays like shit you just have never rebuilt the flippers and they play terribly and you know what's funny is like the other home collectors you know glorify buying from other home collectors and i was like this is weird i'd i'd much rather have a game from an operator that i know and trust like when i'm buying that game i'm like oh this game's been well cared for that's the way i look at it and any visual damage is just visual damage you can see that with your own eyes there's no like hidden damage like for me buying from an operator i trust it more yeah then i bought them from a home collector it's gonna probably be more honestly represented yeah that's also true yeah yeah ever since your episode on flipper rebuilds i've been absolutely paranoid about my flippers not being rebuilt thanks for that yeah right after we recorded that i went and did a rebuild on mine yeah i was like okay it's like i suppose we recorded an episode i can't be a hypocrite i do it all the time man i do flipper rebuilds all the time like if we have a modern game like a popular super modern like a like a brand new stern or whatever we get enough plays on our game that like those flippers need to be built every like four to six months and i know that sounds crazy but it's like you know we have a we had a godzilla premium that had 60 000 plays before we sold it yeah and like i had to rebuild those flippers like five or six times wow pretty nuts well that's a good segue actually into doing a rural route because you do have to care for the machines you got to have every switch working you got to have the flippers working right you gotta have everything working right you can't build uh people people's interest in the game when it doesn't work yeah or it plays crappy like even if they don't know how to play pinball it they will see it's like wait i hit that shot and something nothing happened yes they'll even they'll pick that up so it's like you got your machines got to be you know treated like you love them like they're they are in your home right and but the good news about being a real I was laughing at your plays on Godzilla because I got my Deadpool Pro, right? Put it straight out. And in 2025, what, almost five years ago, I checked the total play count the other day. 6,500. Oh, well, there you go. I don't know what you're charging, but if you're charging a buck a play, that's what, you know, it's paid for itself. So it's not bad. Yeah. Yeah. Not bad, right? Well, I had to cut. I give the house a cut. So I haven't made my money back yet in five years. But hey, the game's still worth money though. Okay but going back a step before we get into your cut because I want to ask about that You have in the notes to keep the keys to the machine stay with you So even when you have a business you trust you still have to even though this isn your livelihood you still take that side of the business seriously Do you do like audits I always this is one thing that i never even talked to rodsey or any of the operators i know about but do you do like audits on your games and like share that with the operators or is it just like an honor system that you're giving them their cut no yeah i count the i weigh the quarters and tell them what they owe me and then they keep the quarters oh you know it's just a total honor thing oh that's interesting that's me they give me i have key to the shop so i can go in and work after hours you know when they're when they're not open that makes it real nice that's really nice easier to work on a game when no one's around fucking nice that they let you in there after hours because that's like the the nightmare scenario that i've always thought about with like if i wanted to operate on my own is it's like i don't want to go work on games in a bar while the bar is open oh John Youssi you come into wedge all the time John Youssi me doing that shit i'm doing that all the time part of the show at wedge people love it dude it's like they gather around alan's a zoo animal in there it's like they're watching like a bear like balancing on a ball they're like what's he doing and you're like this is a flipper rebuild alan does 10 a day and now alan takes the glass off the pinball machine i'd pay for that show i would not i would not want to be doing that at a random bar so having that's the thing about like if you were operating and this was your livelihood and we've talked about this in the episode of starting your own pinball bar or whatever location's important and even when you're doing this just kind of for fun and to build a scene location's still very important the criteria might just be a little different you also put here give a generous cut and i agree with this completely i think it makes sense for the location to feel like they're a partner and i talked to a lot of operators i love talking to operators it's actually my favorite shit part of the show was like man nobody talks that's kind of going to be the whole show it was originally going to kind of be the whole show was like, I want to talk to operators because nobody talks about the business side of location pinball. Nobody talks about location pinball hardly at all anyway, but then also like the business side of it. And I think it's so interesting because I also believe like in talking to you is like, we have very different markets. In Portland, we are the biggest location pinball market in the whole world. And you're in a very small pinball market and you're bringing pinball to people. So our experiences are different, but also the same, right? Like we're both operating pinball. We're both trying to do the same things. We just have different factors that influence us. But I agree. Like in Portland, it's very common that, you know, you get like a 60, 40 split. And I hear that from other operators and I won't blow them up because I don't want to blow up their spots. But they told me in confidence that they're getting 90 10 they're getting 90 and i'm like wow that'd be nice you know obviously like as an operator doing all the work buying the games and that kind of stuff i understand that i'm sure rodsey would love that for his route but right you know we have so many other people operating games that it keeps the split down in the market but i also talked to some of those operators in those emerging markets that get these great splits i was like that's great when i saw your outline that you wrote for this episode and you write, give a generous cut. What I'm hearing there is that you were probably offered a very good cut and then you decided to be more generous with it because you wanted them to feel like a partner. And I think that that's underrated, very valuable with an operator and the location owner. Because I think if the location owner feels appreciated, it's a building of trust. But it's also like a reason that on their own social media or on their own posters or whatever they want to promote this other side of their business which is your pinball machines in their locations and it just makes things like hosting league or hosting tournaments easier better they might put up prizes things of that nature that you can work with a location it's not always worth nickel and diming a location owner to get a specific split sometimes it's like yeah hey like we're in this together like let's do this like kind of pinball business inside your yeah well game store if they're actually seeing something from it they're going to have be a lot more motivated to see that grow as well skin in the game right it's just skin in the game right and particularly in a small town like if you're in a big city i do i recommend get as much as you can but in a small town you want i want to keep the doors open on this business yeah 100 you want that place to succeed down i lose i lose i got i got 18 games for sale yeah you know it's like i guess that's a good point because it's like you're invested in the business as well like you don't have a backup location yeah there's not an obvious backup location yeah so you're like shit we need this to work for both of our sakes dude you're right they do help out a lot i got a one big tournament we do every year is coming up in the first weekend of june you can go to lassenpinball.com and find out the deets on it but it's like a pinberg style tournament they're expanding their back arcade and so i'm gonna have 32 machines there we'll have a player cap of like 64 it's like the it's like one of the biggest things that happens in town now like people that's a big yeah that's right yeah that's sick okay so tell us about your location choice like yeah you have it in here bar not ideal after your introduction i think i have a strong understanding of why you say that but expand on that yeah the bar scene not everybody wants to go into a bar i know i know i'm talking to bar owner here so i'm trying to tread lightly but but you know not it's not for everybody right the scene oh for sure and i know different bars have different uh degrees is it a real dive bar or is it like a high end you know there's different degrees of what a bars can be like but i like to have kids or teenagers being able to come in and be part of this thing as well if they if they want to so i'm trying to keep the the market as wide as possible, a wide net. Yep. Right. And so not having in a bar a help. Right. Because it's your market. So, yeah, it immediately caps. You're like you'll never you know, you're not going to have a single customer under 21. And if that's a big part of your local scene, that's huge. Well, and not even not even just like those people, but there's also the families looking for things to do with their kids. That's its own market. So it's like you don't get those adults that only go out with their kids as well. Like, they might be, they're over 21 if they're having kids, I'm hoping, or, you know, like, close to it. But, like, you know. You don't want 20-year-olds with kids. Yeah, exactly. Like, I think it's interesting because, like, for me as a player, I'm not even really that big of a drinker, to be honest. But I love playing at a bar for, like, the opposite. Like, it's like, I don't, like, it's a place where I don't have to be around kids. You don't like kids. Yeah. yeah totally that makes sense totally that makes sense what i was going to ask are kids a big part of your business you think like do John Youssi a lot of uh underage people playing or do you have a lot of adults there is it you know what's the mix like some kids have played in the league but not a lot but the business use does do parties there and so a big selling point is having that arcade and they have some some video games around kids go there for parties there's not a lot of party venues in town yeah so everyone has their birthday party at this game store yeah that makes sense to me that'd be rad in a small town you're like yeah i definitely want to have my birthday party here that's uh-huh yeah i see you also wrote goal of five machines for gathering tell us about that number about getting to five machines at a location well like on a typical league night we'll play four machines everybody plays the same four machines so you want to have five So in case one goes down, preferably one from every era, that kind of evens out the playing field a little bit so noobs can have a shot at beating somebody on an EM, have a shot anyway. That's why we like classics because they kind of narrow the gap. So there's always a chance. Oh, totally. Like you can be the best player in the world and you can still get fucked on an EM and like a new guy will have a shot. Absolutely. I love that. Absolutely. And they play faster. Right. Yeah, that's also a big part of what I like. You're like, yeah, it helps speed the whole thing up. Hey, finals is on sing-along. Good luck. You know, like, yeah, there you go. Let's go. And so, yeah, also, if you have four machines and everybody's playing at the same time, you're not sitting around waiting. You know, it just keeps the action moving if you have enough machines to handle a group of, you know, 15, 20 anyway. Yeah, so it's just kind of based off the size of the group, keeping a spare in the rotation, which I think is a very good point. portland's league it's like a traveling league you pick a home bar or whatever leagues for anyone listening leagues change everywhere you go it's kind of funny because i think a lot of people assume like pinball league is some established rule set yeah every city runs their own pinball league differently and the first time you realize that you're like what the hell do you guys do here but that is worth explaining or clarifying is because yeah you're right i moved here and i was like i i grew i were i got into pinball in um south dakota which i'll get into a bit later the league there you were on your own and you had like a random match-up with people every you meet up with three people or whatever so a group of four every week and you kind of just had to talk to them and figure out a time that worked well for you to meet up oh wow it was cool it was cool though because you would show up and would just be you for that is you get to play your matches and it was like just a complete honor system like you guys all kind of report how everybody did and it was like completely unregulated chaos because there were only like 20 guys in the local scene. Right. And so it was like you kind of knew what was going on. But then I came to Portland and it's like this organized thing where you have teams, there's rules about who's allowed to sub. So that all gets very convoluted, very different. That's the only reason I'm mentioning that is it's different everywhere. But in Portland, they have a minimum that a team, if you want to have a home base, has to have four games. And I think that's a good number until a game or two goes down and you're like now sitting there playing two games waiting like four hours on a weeknight or i guess it's always a sunday night yeah but that's the beginning of the work week for most people i've had that where or one of the games nobody like you have a game go down and one of the ones that's there and everybody keeps not picking because they're like well i don't want to play wheel of fortune or whatever it's so i think five is a good number fives are really to me that's like that feels like a pinball location i love locations with two or three games like little bars and stuff but five feels like this is a spot where i will go play pinball you can have a tournament or you can have a league with five games and like marcus said you can represent all the eras really well with five games that's also true you have the next one marcus this is the one i probably disagree with the most but i knew that i knew this was coming i think we should chop this one up tb with si which i'm assuming is stern insider yeah so tell me about that it hey different strokes for different folks alan i hear you so some guys really love seeing their name up there uh-huh do we want to encourage them to play more or discourage them to play more yeah alan okay well i have strong feelings about this as waterboy knows is like we are a location that does not have a stern insider leaderboard correct and we won't ever have one right i don't know ever you won't ever have roads is always trying to get me to have one that's like one half of one half of the wedgehead management is like actively trying to do it as soon as roads understands how to use a computer i suspect you'll get one okay so wedgehead will never have a tv whisper an insider connected um so so my counterpoint is we did a whole insider connected episode for the listener if you haven't listened to that episode you can go back and listen to it i'm not against turning insider connected i think that's actually awesome for operators and i think that particularly the leaderboards just give operators another tool in the toolbox you just choose whether or not you use it what i disagree with is the concept fundamentally that like you need an insider board or nobody's going to play these games and like that's where I'm like, well, this is just BS. People will play this game if I put it out there and I hype it and I create a league. If I'm doing all this legwork as an operator, because basically what you're saying, the way I hear that sort of when I hear that blanket statement is, okay, so the other games, like if I buy a Medieval Madness, then that game's not worth playing because it's not on a leaderboard. Yeah. You know what I mean? Or, you know, like I get. It's not connected. It's not worth it. You know, there are certain players like that. There are absolutely players that like, you'll see it on the forum sometimes where they'll like Stern Insider has made this to where I don't want to play any game where I can't log in. I'm like, okay, that's fine. But to me, I always see it like when we have a Wi-Fi issue or whatever and somebody can't log into the game, they're still going to play that Godzilla. Like, I mean, they were there to play that Godzilla. They're still going to play it. They're already there, dude. They're going to play it. I get it, though, because it's like I can see it driving. It's tough because it's really hard to quantify what's actually making a difference. But like you said, it's another tool, and it's also a fairly hands-off. it's like you got to set it up but then past that it's pretty easy for operators and people just like people just like getting on the leaderboards man it's like an innate thing and it's just like one more leaderboard and it's it's kind of a bullshit leaderboard because it's not like it's like weekly or whatever i just hate that i just hate that somebody can be locked can be not logged in put up a high score in that one month period anyway and not be counted well that's because you should be logging in. That's what I disagree with. I just disagree with that. Well, that sounds, Alan, like you care very much about the leaderboard up on the wall. Yeah, it sounds like you're upset you're not getting on those leaderboards because you're not logging in. Yeah. But, Marcus, do you think that genuinely, do you get a lot of positive feedback about that specifically? Are you inferring that because you're seeing guys or guys excited about that or people, players excited about that? There's a huge ramp up at the end of the month, and there's a huge ramp up at the beginning of the month. that's crazy to me. We'll talk about this at the end of the episode. Cause I wrote a whole rant about this, but we'll save that for the end. I like to foreshadow these things for the listener. I just believe that there's multiple ways to do everything. And I just think like, that's why I like talking to operators in different regions and hearing what works for them and their location and why and how it's done for them. My personal take the short version before we get to the end of this episode is when I put a new Stern game out, The reason why it valuable to me as an operator is that I can put it out You fuckers are going to come in and play it no matter what We have insiders set up on all of our stuff so if you coming in to collect your badges or your weekly badges or whatever it's there, you know what I mean? Yeah. But to me, I'm trying to get you to come in and play Mystic, that we just put a new play field into, that we completely restored. Those games, I feel like I have to sell you as like, this game's rad, and here's why. I have no problem with people playing our Dungeons & Dragons from stern so like why am i pushing it at all if anything i need to take some people that were going to play dungeons and dragons yeah you get them to play mystic you're trying to distribute them but you also are in like a pinball city where people are seeking out the new stuff naturally because we already are but like marcus is doing the same thing he's operating games of all eras so i'm going like he has a sing-along we have a sing-along our sing-along is to the point where we only bring it out during the holidays and when we fucking take that game off the floor I fucking hear about it dude people are like why did you pull sing-along out and I was like dude it'll be back in the winter dude you know like yeah especially like that's a that's a small two-inch flipper em yeah you know think about how crazy that is to like other operators that listen to the show think about how crazy that is that like I could put a wedge head in a single player Gottlieb short flipper em and like people are pissed that it's gone you know and why do I get that it's because i focus on being like sing-alongs rad yeah if you don't think so you can come into wedgehead and you'd be like what game do you like i was like let's go play some games on it by the end of us playing games on world beauties or any of our solar like any solar city or any of our ems i guarantee you you're going to leave with a different impression of what an em can be and how much fun it can be or any classic solid state or whatever and so that's how i view it as my role i'm trying to be like hey yeah yeah the new stuff's good this old stuff is pure dope though you know what i mean like i'm gonna show you why this is dope and we're gonna play together we're gonna have a good time i do the same thing with league because every league night we play four games one em one early solid state one dmd and then a modern so the and i love that's how our players get fall in love with the older stuff 100 you gotta get people they don't draw people in naturally anymore for a variety of reasons and so it's like you have to sell years old you have to sell the old stuff but then it's like people get it once they start playing them that's the hard part and speaking of speaking of like we kind of have been hopping around here on the order or whatever but getting back to having all eras of games represented your games on coin drop what kind of earnings do John Youssi across eras of games is it very clearly like newer makes more money and it just is a linear scale back or how's that how's that do for you because sometimes you get surprising results yeah it is it's it is stern because the modern sterns because and i have a toy story four out but they're they're a buck a play six plays for five bucks kind of a deal you know they have the highest sticker price and they also make the most i have all my dmds on 50 cents i might bump them to 75 yeah and then uh after that it's 50 cents for early solid state and then a quarter for ems i don't know how to make it more than a quarter on em do you you can't i mean it two inch flipper two inch flipper game is a quarter i wouldn't i mean i think it's like part of it to me if i was going to do anything sometimes ems especially really hard ems sometimes you know it's going back to getting them like three plays for a dollar or three plays for a quarter or something if they're really brutal and can play fast that's the one nice part about wedge well there's we've done a whole thing about payment options or whatever right but a really nice part about wedgehead being entry fee is that it's like you don't even have to worry about it and people just kind of like play what they're drawn to and they don't even think about what it's costing them which is nice i had a quick question for you in 30 you had 30 of in of sales comes from your arcade now is i think what you said on a podcast once from pinball pinball revenue it's like 28 to like 30 depending on the month a lot how did that change when you went from coin drop to cover Oh, it more than doubled. Okay. So cover more than doubled revenue. Yeah. See, I'm thinking about moving that direction myself, honestly. It more than doubled. I think we were looking at basically when we were on Coindrop, we had the same kind of pinball room. And so the same number of machines and it was basically like 14% of our revenue before we moved to FreePlay. And now it can be like 28 to 30%. So it has like basically doubled it. It's cool. It's really interesting seeing who's enthused about like an entry fee free play arcade versus who complains about it. Oh, yeah. And we did that whole episode talking about kind of like the pros and cons to every payment method. but it's just especially for like being in a small town and trying to grow the scene it seems like a really strong contender to me for at least trying free play it's it sucks because it's a pain in the ass to switch all your games over to free play so you can't really just flip a switch and do it one day a week i mean you can but damn that's a lot of work oh yeah it's a lot of work like you yeah trying to switch 20 games over to free play and you're like dealing with ems and shit oh that would suck honestly the ems are sometimes easier because it's just like a yeah it's like a Hilton Jones plug yeah if you have access to the back of the game i know i know because it's like okay pull the game away from the wall i know i know take the panel oh it's a no i i mean i've seen arcades that that do that the old school way ground control used to do that they used to do i mean they still do now but now they're on a card system so it's easy for them to switch from free play to back or whatever back in the day when they were only on coin drop they used to like once and then it became twice a month where they would do free play nights and that seems like a nightmare because They have 40-something pinball machines, and then they have probably 100 arcade cabinets or more. And I was like, that seems like a nightmare, dude. My buddy in South Dakota that had an arcade, he would always have people before he had a payment system or whatever, when it was just all physical quarters, and he would have people be like, oh, can you do private events? Can you put the games on free plays? Like, I don't want to. Part of it is, like, we realized that, like, we had so many people that wanted to have events and have parties. and the number one thing always always always was we want to provide as the party host gaming we want to provide free gaming and we're like well we can sell you quarters nobody liked it same like nobody like the same as just being like it's free go up play as much as you want yep yep and so that has helped us book parties for sure it's just really interesting so that's one thing that just since you're asking about it i if you do end up switching in the future i'd be very curious how what goes for you. I really, to me, as someone that got into pinball, I would just would have been like a game changer. I would have been so excited to have a free play pinball spot when I was getting into pinball. It allows you to be a junkie about it for sure. It allows you to just go out there and just like practice. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically you're changing Marcus. The way it is, is like you're changing it from being like, here's my set margin price per game is this. I have to split it with the location. My split is this. So the price has to be this so it makes it worth my time to put these games buy these games put them out maintain them all that kind of stuff yeah and it changes it to me like i don't care if you get while you're at wedgehead your your pay per play down to 25 cents go wild what i'm doing is i'm i'm raising the floor of what you were going to spend you can no longer come in and spend two dollars and then leave you you now have to spend twelve dollars you could play all day and buy nothing else but then also maybe if you're there maybe now you're hungry you get a burger which we offer yeah maybe you get a beer pokemon booster packs yeah which we don't offer that's funny because our game zone does offer the pokemon well there you go i saw they had cards i was looking at people would be buying those cards okay we should move on though we got to keep this moving so we already talked about the location and the business and that partnership we talked about your game lineup and setup and everything. Your next big thing on here is starting a league. Why are you such a big fan of league? League builds community. Tournaments creates winners and losers. I think that's a very good takeaway, honestly. Yeah. So our league runs six weeks, kind of like I think another one of your guys did. I think a similar way. We run six weeks, once every two weeks, not a huge commitment of time, easy to be consistently engaged because you only have to go once every two weeks. You got to come to four out of the six weeks and you're automatically in the playoff, but everybody just shows up. You play the same four games. You get one point for every person you beat that night. So the scores are kept and then league points are sent out. I keep an email list of everybody. And then we have a recap the next day or two of how it went. We kind of just throw in some fun jibes at some, you know, a really good player had a bad game. You know, he threw him a little ribbing. Make it fun. Everybody has a good time, right? It's not super competitive. It's a league. We're just hanging out, having fun, playing pinball with, you know, groups of four, having a good time, encouraging each other, giving each other advice, screaming in each other's ear. You know, it's not tournament, right it's just fun i think there's a really big shift anytime you're playing competitive pinball there's a very big difference between playing in competitive pinball where people are rooting for you versus against you and that's like the biggest reason that howdy partner at wedgehead is the format that it is is because trying to you know actually be helping each other and when you have the community where you're like you're trying to explain the games you want the people you're playing with to do better that's such a big distinction and it makes it so much nicer when you're new oh yeah and that's the big reason league i i 100 agree league is the way to go for competitive pinball over just straight up tournaments at least the way to start for sure like you should probably do both once the scene's established but also just realize that they're different things in scope and in focus and that one is way better at bringing new people into the fold than the other one yep you know like an ifpa tournament is a different thing even if your league is ifpa rated it's a different thing entirely than you know a big match play or a big strikes tournament or whatever whatever format it is it's just a different thing altogether yep yeah you wrote minor on competition major on fun i agree with that and then you put emphasis on player development this is what i want to ask you about you say give a lineup with tutorial links. I think that's great. I think it's fantastic. Yeah. So on our email reminders before league, like the day before I send out a list of the games that we're going to play that week and try to put a nice Bowen tutorial with it or something, a nice YouTube tutorial with it, if there is one. And just so people can have a chance to like, whoa, really start learning about strategies for games, game specific strategies, just to encourage them like, whoa, I'm going to go try that you know work on work on learning that game more yeah it's very smart yeah even if you're not able to kind of like get that together in time for league it'll kind of be like okay this is what i gotta work on with this game in the future yep that's one thing that i haven't seen too much firsthand recently i was i went on a trip to japan and or whatever and so i was kind of like diving into the whole like is there a pinball scene in japan and stuff into a lot of those places it's a very new scene right it's not a popular thing there all of the places that have any kind of pinball events have like tutorials i'm like this is how you do everything and like if they get a new game they'll make a big post on like twitter and be like this is where you start modes this is where you start multiballs and i'm like man i wish we saw more of that here i know a lot of us in the hobby it's like we know what we're doing we know how to find those tools if we want to figure out something but like when you're new you need somebody to explain just like yeah Like this is how you start multiball, man. Because that's huge. It'll make the difference between liking a game or hating it. Absolutely. So tell us about you have Sunday school in quotation marks. What does that mean? Yeah, we'll do like a silver ball Sunday school where we'll just have it open to anyone who'd like to come in and learn, work on techniques. And so we just go over trapping, dead pass, you know, a live catch. and we'll just walk everybody through one skill at a time on a different machine and just say, okay, these are some of the flipper skills that you're seeing other players use and you can learn them today. That's pretty cool. And so coming in practice. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Yeah. So just as a way for free. This is awesome. This is what being a good operator is. Like you can make pinball work anywhere. You got to work it to make it work. Yeah, you're like putting the work in. You're putting the work in here to grow a legitimate, like growing a scene, which is possible anywhere. I just love, you know, you also write about celebrating growth. I think you mean like players as their skills improve and celebrating those milestones. Yeah. It's like, it's amazing. Like an hour or a rookie to a, you know, first season player, all of a sudden they, a couple of seasons into it, they get top dog on a game for a week. You know, they got the highest score out of, on one of the four games that we played in league. It's like hey how about this give me the air horn right so just celebrating that's always the funnest thing right when John Youssi new players come in and all of a sudden they blow up put up 192,000 on space mission oh you know it's like dude they know the game now and they are hitting it i love it i love that too uh i'm gonna run through some of these last points a little bit quickly because I know our episode's getting a little bit long here, but you also write about managing the over-imbibed, including pinball, you know, encouraging pinball performance and avoiding 86ing if possible. I understand, like, if you're in a place and people like to drink a little too much, you know, like it could cause them to be rowdy and you always want to make sure that people are having fun first and foremost, you know, and getting to run tournaments and all that kind of stuff. You have a, I want to focus on this one opinion here where you have a match play over head-to-head. You want to explain that in an IFPA tournament? What's a match play versus head to head and why you feel a certain way about it? Just real quick on that is like in a bigger city, you can 86 people a lot easier because you have more people. Yeah. Whereas in rural, you kind of have to work with people where they're at. And sometimes you have to work a little harder. Right. You might find somebody who really into pinball but they getting a little too hammered and they just getting sloppy It like you know you want to be able to try to coach them up and say look you know you not playing well when you get when you have too much and it like you just encourage them like look you're going to play a lot better if you just wait you know or just have less and wait till playing your last game for the night then maybe start drinking right so you just kind of like help them see the lies like hey we're all here to like the focus is good pinball we're all trying to improve our skills we're all trying to get better together we're trying to have fun on pinball you know some of these other things they they take away from good play so anyway but for tournaments on running match play works way better for tournaments to me it's similar to the whole thing with league of it being more fun and more social i mean that's why our big tournament every year is a pinberg style tournament because i love hanging out with a group of four people and playing four machines all together you get to know somebody you talk to right you you're in the same group you actually get to know people and you have funny it's like uh i don't know what maybe i just won't get last you know maybe i'll shoot for a third right if i get third on this game i'm happy it's like you know so that's a lot better than a head-to-head right i understand that so alex was saying you have a good example of a rural location yeah i wanted to just bring up just so anybody listening isn't like oh well like this couldn't work you know a different way or you got to exactly replicate this formula. I came, so the city I got into pinball, I was living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota at the time. Really shortly after I left, the dedicated pinball spot there ended up shutting down or going to really limited hours or whatever. And it was kind of like a blow for the local community because that's where league happened and everything. And so one of the local enthusiasts, a guy named Casey, ended up seeking out a new place to play games. And he found a pizza spot that had two dining rooms, one of which had been unused for a long time and it was like like you said it's like finding the right location where it's like a symbiotic thing because they already had the staff they already had like a bureau license and they had just an empty room so they kind of were like eager to have something fill that it ended up being like very much a group of hobbyist operators nobody there was doing it as a full-time job but it's a whole variety of guys because Sioux Falls is pretty fairly big City, I think it's a couple hundred thousand, but it didn't have a dedicated pinball spot, but it had a pinball scene. And it was just kind of an interesting thing to see. I wasn't there firsthand to see it, but it's been, from what I can tell, a very big success. And now the scene is getting bigger than it ever was when I was living there. So it's just kind of cool to see these kind of like grassroots efforts from guys that aren't necessarily doing this as a full-time job. But if you put in the work, you can see results and you can really build that community. a lot of that a lot of similarities with what you did you were in a much i'm shocked that you were able to build such like an actual like scene in a city as small as you're in well even like todd we talked to out in astoria astoria is like a town of 10 000 yeah that's true and it's just it's like when you guys put in the work like you get results it's it's really cool to see and i just i like seeing the different ways that everybody kind of goes about it and what's worked for you versus is what hasn't in kind of like what your takeaways were yeah no we've had we've got guys they're they're playing lots of tournaments and stuff now down in reno i had one guy from up here in susanville playing the nevada state champions this year oh that's awesome and uh a few other because they play in reno so they get nevada points yeah so and and other guys another guy just won a local weekly down there at a bar a really nice bar in uh sparks called elbow room Shout out to Ted. Love you, Teddy. But he has great stuff, beautiful games, beautiful lineup. But he runs a weekly and one of our guys won that, you know, so it's like it's amazing how the skill improves over time. Absolutely. With guys who are committed. I mean, we were in our fifth year now of league. Man, it's it's just so much fun. It's just so much fun to see people come together playing pinball and they weren't there before. like there was no scene like yeah they are they are out there they're out there you just don't see them you haven't met them yet and some of those people don't even know that they're gonna be a part of the scene you know what i mean like exactly there's so many people walking this earth right now that haven't realized that they love pinball yet and that's where the opportunity is that's where the opportunity is true so i just like to end this with i got i got some closing thoughts here because I thought this was a great episode to highlight a lot of these things that I think about and haven't really placed in a certain episode yet, but it sort of jives with why we do the operator series in the first place. But I want to say to the listener, when you're listening to anyone speak, whether it's myself or Alex on this podcast, somebody else on a different social media platform, somebody from a pinball company, whatever, we're all just stating our sometimes variable points of view. And I think sometimes it's easy to get lost in like a dogmatic approach to solving any problem and talk as if there's like one single path or one playbook on how to be successful when that's really not the case. Like all of us are humans and we're susceptible to common like reasoning heuristics. But the two I think that apply most commonly when we talk about operating pinball machines are confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Confirmation bias is something that we as humans all do regularly. Like when we feel like something is true or we've witnessed an event happen, we will then look to find more evidence of that same said thing occurring. Like has traffic in Portland gotten worse? I will then search for information through that lens and not the opposite, which is has traffic in Portland gotten better? So example, like I was doing this the other day. I might listen to an album by a band and really, really love it. In my mind, I might go, you know what? Painkiller is actually the best album that Judas Priest ever made. I might Google best Judas Priest albums, and I'll find a bunch of lists that also say Painkiller is the best. This is confirmation bias-seeking behavior. I will use any evidence I find that supports my own personal theory that Painkiller is the best Priest album and use it to validate that experience, right? I will bolster my confidence that what I believed in the first place was right i will also subconsciously dismiss the other inputs that i'm receiving where other folks might be like it's defenders of the faith or it's screaming for vengeance or staying class that's the best album right stuff is subjective and it's different things are true for different people yeah and so just the way that you can search for information could lead to various results if i were looking at is judas priest painkiller the best judas priest album i'm going to find different versions of information than if i go is british steal their best album I'm going to get different results and you can always support that's the thing with insider connected with me or with why I believe in having old games or games of all eras that's part of the the basis of when we talk about these things and you're one thing that works for somebody might not necessarily work for everybody like I had somebody recently that bought a Sopranos and then told me uh you said that this thing earns like a new game well uh you know my Dungeons and Dragons is out earning the Sopranos that I went and hunted down I go yeah I mean it earns like a new game for us in Portland. Yeah. So you know what I mean? Like what's true for somebody might not be true for somebody else. It doesn't mean that it's still not true. Yeah, there's not a formula that you can just, there's too many factors. Confirmation bias in pinball could be something like, is Godzilla the greatest pinball machine of all time? Well, you can certainly find a lot of evidence if you look at it through that lens, but you can also readily find evidence that would say Medieval Madness is actually the best game of all time or any other game, whatever game you want, You can find evidence for that, right? I mean, we've recorded an episode about how Raven's the best game of all time. Exactly, you know. And then the other one I think that happens when we're talking to operators, and I think it's important to sort of like center this, is like we're talking about our own experience, right? But survivorship bias is a powerful thing in human nature. Survivorship bias is the idea that we dismiss any evidence from the depth of something and only look to the living examples, like survival, as to learn something. Essentially, we dismiss the exterior factors of luck and chance that play into success. Yeah, this came up in our original versus licensed theme episodes. We overemphasize the skills of survivors. So the dead are dead because they're stupid or incompetent. Like Polly Williams. Right. Yeah, exactly. And not because they were just unlucky, right? Or that, you know, the reverse belief that all survivors are smart and competent rather than lucky. A good example of this was like in a study in 87. they found they were like it was reported that cats who fall from less than six stories and are still alive have greater injuries than cats who fall from higher than six stories yeah then people are like oh well why is that well that's weird that doesn't seem to make sense they're like well it might happen because cats are reaching terminal velocity and they write themselves at about five stories so they're more relaxed so they have less you know like injuries or whatever and then somebody else is like maybe it's just that uh survivorship bias like a lot more cats that fell from greater than six stories died yeah you don't bring a dead cat into a veterinarian's office ago can you examine its injuries you know what i mean like yeah i'll bring this back to pinball here something of the sense of like there were two pinball arcades in a town right or their region and one of them closes and the other one survives so you can easily be led astray with survivorship bias and learn the wrong lessons when you examine them like you could be like one of them closed was on token play and the other was on card play yeah what led you to believe that token play can't work because that one closed well that doesn't make sense you could find a fucking a bunch of successful token operated arcades around the country and around the world well even going back to like sioux falls there was two arcades the dedicated pinball place and another arcade owned by my buddy 81 and the dedicated pinball spot that ran league and everything is the one that went out of business so it's easy to be like oh well the pinball guys aren't going to make money but now the pinball room opened up and it's doing great basically replicating the bonus rounds model with some tweaks yeah and so you're like you got to be careful when you're trying to take lessons from these things and make sure you won't get the wrong the wrong lesson out of this because there's so many variables right like it could have been uh the part of town with more foot traffic one location they could have maintained their games and the other one didn't or they might have had a death in the family and had to close or like just some bad or like someone wanted to retire someone like someone running the business could have found a better way to make money. Yeah. Because I think like, yeah, that's why I love your podcast, guys, because and these operator spotlights, because I always seem to pick up at least one tip from every single guy you interview. Yeah, I think that's what we really want to kind of hammer home, because it's really easy for listeners to give us like feedback or whatever on like, well, you said this in my personal experience says that. Yeah. And you're like, well, of course, because there's so many different things. And both of those things can be true. And we don't want someone to come away from this episode and be like, well, if you're doing a rural business, you've got to do this, you've got to do that or whatever. And you're like, no, you have to find the pieces that work for you. And that means taking all the information in. And I think, honestly, to me, like the actionable stuff is like build the scene, give them tips, that thing like those are those are so important. The recurring pieces from every successful operator we've talked to is that they first of all, they have a passion for pinball but that's also again confirmation bias because we only talk to people that are passionate about pinball yeah exactly there's a lot of operators that are doing well that are shit yeah they hate pinball and don't care that the games play well right and so like it's so easy to kind of like see this seep through but you're like i think we've tried to convey what's important to us and what is consistent across that it's difficult pinball is an expansive hobby and if you want to operate games but you don't necessarily want to run tournaments you don't have to if you don't want to stream you don't have to you know what i mean you don't want to operate any of the old games that you always hear us preaching about how cool are on the show you don't have to you can put just sterns out and they'll make money yeah you could just put only jersey jacks out the whole scene do that nothing but modern boutique stuff yeah and people will be happy it's like there are many paths to success we have our own feelings like i have strong feelings about what makes Wedgehead successful in our area. And Marcus has his and his, but we're just telling our stories. Yeah. It's our journey. And so that's why I like to talk to operators because I'm like, we're picking up pieces and tips from each other. It's better when we communicate. There's a bunch of different ways to skin the same cat. There's not one blueprint. If there was, that's all we would see. And they'd be everywhere. And pinball would have never died because it would have been like, this game with this game, this many games in this way with this payment model. that's the way and then it would just be huge you know what i mean like it's very interesting to talk to other operators marcus this was a beautiful evening i want to thank you very much for coming on the show this is one of my favorite operator spotlight series we've ever done and uh yeah just thank you for your work down in susanville and we'll definitely stop by if we're ever in the northern california area like yeah coming down the east side of east side of sierra nevadas yeah you're on your way to oregon on your way down to socal you can come down the east side instead of down the i-5 well that's the beautiful side too so you're in the beautiful country so we want to encourage anyone if you're anywhere near that area or going through it take the back roads stop through susanville play some of marcus's games yeah insane lineup you never think a city with 10 000 people would have such a sick lineup in it unbelievable but until next time good luck Don't suck. As the scene crawls into town Straight out of hell What other kind Stuck in his business Don't look behind tonight Brawler He has a big fish in his back Night brawler You know he's coming back Tonight brawler you