🎵 Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. My name is Alan. I'm your co-host of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast and one of the owners of the Portland Pinball Bar Wedgehead. I'm joined by my co-host, Alex the Waterboy. Hey, howdy. And we have a very special guest this evening, one that needs no introduction, but I shall give one anyway. He is a legend of the pinball industry. He was a writer for GQ magazine, wrote an early article about pinball for them. This led him to researching and writing the first major published book about pinball. He interviewed all the titans of the industry right at the peak of pinball's cultural zenith, and he famously played pinball in front of the New York City Council to prove that it was in fact a game of skill and not merely a degenerate form of gambling, leading to the repeal of arcane laws and legalizing pinball not only in New York City, but in many other cities across the country as well. He founded the Professional Amateur Pinball Association, or PAPA, with his friend Steve Epstein, which was the predecessor to the IFBA that is run today by his son, Josh. He consulted with many different pinball manufacturers and even designed a handful of games in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On April 18th, 1988, he was hired as the director of marketing at Williams, a company founded all the way back in 1944 by the subject of our episode today, the incomparable Harry Williams. Allow me to introduce our guest today, who you might recognize as the subject of the 2022 movie based upon his life, the man who saved pinball, Mr. Roger Sharp. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I mean, that is somewhat of an introduction. I sit here, I am dumbfounded by all, not only the research that you've done, but the fact that I guess that somehow defines much of my life. So thanks for that. You are an absolute legend and a true jack of all trades in the pinball industry. And, you know, you're famous for many things in pinball, namely the famous shot in New York City, which I promised you I would not ask you to go into detail about. But there's a wonderful movie that you were an executive producer on about your life that I implore everyone to go watch because it's an awesome movie and a great story. We're delighted to have you. Thank you. Yeah. No, it's my pleasure. And thanks. I'd like to think that really my only impact enduringly has been my sons, Josh and Zach. But we'll let you go forward from there. Yeah. I mean, and they're both involved in the pinball industry. You know, Zach, is he sort of doing basically your job at Williams, but at Stern? Is that more or less similar? I guess it is somewhat more or less. He is the director of marketing. I don't know how directly he is influencing, involved in securing license themes for the company. I know that that seems to be the bailiwick for Gary and for Jody. But I know that Zachary gets involved, you know, somewhere along the way. So it seems to be somewhat strange in many ways and respects, even with Josh being the CFO at Raw Thrills, but also being somewhat heavily involved with play mechanics and their entry into pinball with Pulp Fiction. yeah which is extremely excited to get our pulp fiction i haven't been excited that excited about a new game in a long long time we can't wait but yeah we're i want to talk to you primarily about you did an interview with many people of the pinball industry and they focus on it in the movie about your time to go meet harry williams so i'm going to give a brief kind of overview of the timeline of his career really quickly and then i want to start asking you some questions about your conversation with him and any of your recollections of him. Okay? Sure. And I'm going to try to be better in terms of my long-windedness. So don't want to disappoint anybody hoping to hear, you know, hour-long sentences, but I'm trying to get better. So I'll defer and start with you. Go for it. Roger, you can talk forever, and I would listen to it. So, I mean, if you're talking about pinball, I'm listening. Just saying. I know your kids give you grief about it, but... Fair enough. They do. We're ready to listen. In 1932, Harry Williams begins operating games during the Great Depression. In 1933, Harry starts his first company, Automatic Amusements, in Los Angeles. Later that same year, he puts the first solenoid in a pinball machine, bringing electricity to pin games. In 1934, tired of people cheating his game, Harry designs the first anti-shake device he calls a stool pigeon, but later refines it and renames it to Tilt. after hearing some players calling it a tilt. Harry moves to Chicago in 1935 to work for Rockola, mainly known for jukeboxes. He mates fellow game designer Lynn Durant there. In 1937, Harry and Lynn move over to Bali to work on games. Proves to be short-lived. In 38, Harry and Lynn move again to exhibit supply company. Harry takes over their games division. In 1941, Harry and Lynn leave to found their own company, United Manufacturing, to get government contracts for World War II manufacturing. In 1942, so a year later, Harry sells his stake in United to Lynn and then starts his eponymous Williams Manufacturing Co. In 1944, Sam Stern, which is Gary's dad, joins Harry as a partner in Williams. In 1951, Harry Williams hires Harry Mabbs, who is the inventor of the Flipper, away from Gottlieb to work with him at Williams. In 1959, Harry Williams leaves Williams after the company is bought by Consolidated Drug Co. And in 1971 through 76, he's back in California, but never stops designing games. He sends out drawings to Bally and Williams, and a few of them get produced. In 1978 through 81, Sam Stern, his old buddy and business partner, contracts him to design 10 new solid-state pinball machines for his new company, Stern Electronics. In 1983, he passes away from cancer. I went over a lot of coverage there, but I just want the listener who's unfamiliar with Harry to kind of understand the scope of what he did. And now I just want to ask you about your conversation with him. You flew out to California, to Palm Springs to interview him at his house. I just want to know what your impressions of him were in that interview. And what did you guys talk about? Well, I guess, first off, I am amazed that it's been 50 years since Harry's been gone. It doesn't seem that long. Obviously it is. And we had met prior to as the story goes. And again, this is going to be a long answer, I suppose. When I was doing research for my book, one of the people that I encountered, and you mentioned him in passing as part of Harry's career path, I met up with Gary Stern at a distributorship on the west side of Manhattan called Albert Simon, who was the distributor for Williams Games. and Gary happened to be visiting with Al Simon and Al D'Anzillo, one of the principal salesmen for the distributorship. The game that was, I guess, just on display was Big Ben. So for those who understand the history of pinball, Big Ben was their new game in 1975. I started doing some research. I think at that point in time, I had visited a trade show down in Florida where I met Nolan Bushnell for the first time and was starting to get a little bit more familiar with the business and with people who were involved in it. And my only comment to Gary was whether or not Big Ben, did he realize that it was somewhat like Starpool in terms of the layout? And I threw out some other games that I had encountered in some of my travels, some of my initial research at that point in time. And it's faltered a little bit with my old age. But I had a photographic memory and I started rattling off these different games and the way that the outside lane was and targets and so on. And Gary was just, I guess, dumbfounded at that point in time based on the somewhat earlier start of his career in the business and wound up traveling to what was then the MOA show in Chicago that September, encountered Gary, who wound up introducing me to all sorts of people, ask him anything about pinball, and he'll tell you where it came from or what the derivative is. So in some ways, Gary kind of paved the way for me to make my entry physically into the industry and meeting up with folks, setting up interviews and schedules. Some of that is played out in the movie with Sam Ginsberg, but as well being able to meet Harry, who happened to have been at the show. And in the movie, we kind of play it up as being kind of this Moby Dick situation of trying to find the great whale. Well, Harry I had met prior to, and we talked and visited, chatted, and during the course of events, and there's a great picture in my pinball book, for those who have seen it, of Harry standing in front of a couple of games that he was present with on display. But yes, to answer your question now more directly, Harry invited me out to his house in Palm Springs to meet up with him, met with Wanda, his wife at that point in time, to interview him and talk about Pimble. So that was kind of our start together, if you will. We just really connected. I truly did admire him for what he had achieved and hearing all the stories related to the various successes that he had over the years and how his career started. But I think that there was also this just connection is the best way to describe it. I would call it a love of a fellow who at that point in time was old enough to be my father or even my grandfather. But somehow we were aligned in regard to the passion that we both had for pinball. Yeah. So the conversation really kind of took place. And there we were. And much of it, unfortunately, did not make it into print in the book. but a number of years back, Nate Shivers, who was doing Coast to Coast podcast at that point in time, did play the interview with Harry. So some people were able to hear that and actually hear his voice, what he sounded like for those who were not around prior to his passing. But just a wonderful, marvelous, creative genius. Yes. I mean, that's fascinating. I guess I never realized, I listened to a lot of your talks and interviews. I had never realized that Gary Stern was sort of the linchpin to get you, the person that put you in contact with these other people, right? Like, I guess I never really realized that. I was going to say prior to that, yes, I mean, I had reached out and had met people through Mondial and Tony Eula and others who were the distributors on the East Coast, at least for Gottlieb. I met with Irving Green, whose father was one of the trio of powerful, influential people in the coin-operated amusement game business back in the 30s and 40s and 50s. So, you know, I had a chance at least to somewhat evolve, if you will, in regard to being a researcher and kind of knowing, I won't necessarily say where the bodies were buried so much as it was, you know, who are all of these people as I tried to discover the roots of the industry and take it up to, again, that point in time and meet with everybody and hopefully have some intelligent conversations where I was able to absorb. whatever was historically significant, so that I knew who the players were and could sit down and, I guess, speak to them as equals. It was a trait that I had done really early on in regard to my career at GQ and writing articles and doing research and wanting at least to have some solid footing as I spoke to everyone. And with Gary, I just assumed that that's how games were designed. It was like, well, you must be influenced by this game or that game. And what I wound up discovering was in many ways, and it's probably different now, but in many ways, the history was just so disposable for designers like Steve Kordak and Norm Clark and Gordon Horlick and Wayne Nines and so many others. Right. I don't think really ever went back to the well thinking, oh, yeah, I did that here and let me do it again. I think it just kind of happened as part of their design signature in much the same way that maybe we look at similarities between Steve Ritchie designs over the years or Pat Lawler's design approach or John Boer or now Keith Elwin. You know, where are those similarities? Where are those little touches and tweaks that they bring to their game designs? And with Harry, that was very much the case. So, you know, it was somewhat nice to get feedback from him when I had the chance to design my first game, Sharpshooter. And he wound up looking at it, seeing it, and making some comments about it, which I thought was somewhat endearing. Whoa. And even to the extent we came very, very close to working together. I don't know if you're familiar, and you must be, and hopefully some of your listeners are as well, to the five games that Harry designed for Brunswick for their home machine line of games. and at that point in time uh harry and i based on harry wanting to do so was going to bring me in the two of us were going to really work with brunswick do more games and unfortunately that effort kind of faltered uh at that point in time so we never had a chance to do so oh no that's too bad it's yeah you both got up into some uh some more interesting stuff anyway in that time frame Oh, man. That's impressive to hear that Harry got to see, you know, your design on Sharpshooter and got to play it and gave you notes on it. I mean, that's that's incredible. I mean, that's like that's like getting hitting tips from like Ken Griffey Jr. or something, you know, like you're a kid or, you know, it's just or help with your jump shot from Michael Jordan or something like that's just insane. It was a mutual admiration society because there were times with some of the games that Harry wanted designing where I'd find myself looking over a game or playing it on a show floor and Harry would come over. And this happened a few times. And it was just, I thought you'd like that. I was thinking of you when I put that into the game. Oh, that's so cool. And I think that it was those kinds of touches that just kind of strengthened the bond between the two of us. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I will say that I did a lot of research on Harry for this episode. I've been fascinated with the man, especially over the last six months, just because I, you know, I watched your movie again and I saw the interview with Harry and I started getting on the Internet Pinball database and I started looking at pictures of his games and was just being dumbfounded by the layouts he was doing. and a lot of the things he was doing back from the jump in the 1930s. He was, you know, I just kind of want to go through some of these games and talk about some of his firsts. And I want, if you played any of these games, I want to hear a little bit about it. I personally haven't got to play many of these just because they're not around. A lot of this work that he did in the 40s and 50s, I mean, that stuff's just gone. You know, it's not even really in museums anymore. Outside of maybe the Pacific Pinball Museum, I've played some Harry Williams wood rail games, but... It's hard to find the wood rails pretty much anywhere in the public, even at shows. Yeah. And I haven't been able to crack that collector market that I know is out there of the guys that have wood rails and collect wood rails, because I would love... If anyone's listening to this podcast and you're one of those guys, invite me over. I would love to play some of these games. But in 1933, he creates a game called Contact, and that's famous that it's the first electromechanical game because it includes the first solenoid and pinball machine. Yep. And for listeners, this is before flippers were invented. So we're talking about real pinball, which is just pins and balls. You're just plunging a ball up, and then it's kind of falling down. You're bouncing, nudging the game a little bit or whatever, and trying to control where it's going. Not quite what we know as modern pinball. Right. This is pre-flipper. And then in 1938, he designs a game called Lightning, which, again, has no flippers, but it has a bunch of electromagnets under the playfield that influences the ball after you plunge it. I think a lot of people would be familiar with the Adams family in 1992 by Pat Lawler, where the power magnets move the ball around. But Harry Williams did that in 1938. You know, on a game in 1938, he had something like that, which is just crazy to think about. Right. And then there's Tornado. Tornado would be the first one with the ball, with an elevated ball path, the ball rail. Yeah, it's got a it's again, it has no flippers, but it has a hole that you fall into and it has like a wire guide elevated wire form later on, you know, all games from basically the 19 mid 1980s to today have some form of this, but this is 1947. And then, you know, in St. Louis in 1949, he introduces, in an EM era, he introduces a feature that it's a smart replay adjustment system where the replay would get higher when hit and then would lower itself back down if not hit for a few games in a row. This was advanced in the late 1980s by Bally Williams when you were working there, Roger, and is a feature of all pinball machines since then. I think that's like an interesting part about looking back. replay boost do you know anything about st louis and the way he did this did you ask him about this game or or do you have any recollection of this or why you guys brought it back during your time at williams no we didn't we didn't get into it oh interesting i know that larry demar was instrumental and uh working on uh not only adam's family obviously but also twilight zone with in quotes the Powerball and that mini play field. So I think that whatever those influences might have been whatever the familiarity might have been I mean I did have a chance to play Contact and thought it was just wonderful during my research days of games from that era And I have five antiques as well from the 30s. But many of the games that you're talking about, I know where some of those features have reemerged. Some of them Harry himself has redone and reused. You know, we can get into those games at a later point probably. But in regard to some of these games from the 40s or even some of the refurbished games that he and Lynn worked on at United during World War II. Now, in passing, probably, but never anything that we ever really discussed, you know, specifically together, Harry and myself. You kind of mentioned it in there, but it's interesting to me because a lot of the things that Harry Williams invented back in the 30s or 40s or 50s, they would bring back in the 80s or 90s, and it was heralded as an innovation then, which kind of just goes to show how instrumental he was to creating a lot of the fun toys and just kind of the pinball magic that has hooked a lot of us in the games, I feel like. And I think his contributions are hidden, lost to time, which is why I wanted to do this episode. Exactly. It's kind of interesting because it's like a lot of the stuff, like the score indexing, I think that was introduced for High Speed, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, High Speed in 1986. The power that we see on Adam's Family and the disappearing pop bumper, I don't know if that's in this list. Yeah, that's on this list. Circus Holt Air, a lot of those things that Papa Duke or Steve Ritchie or Lawler are using, and not to discredit them, but it's like they were just going back to the old designs and looking for inspiration there, which is cool. A lot of times they came up with Harry Williams over and over again, like over and over and over again. You see Harry Williams. It's hard not to when you see how much stuff he invented. Yeah, I'm like looking through his and I'm going to put these up on our website when this episode airs because I want people to see all these games because you're probably not going to get to play them anywhere soon. But I want you to see these cool games. I mean, we're in 1952 and he creates a game called Horse Feathers, which is a head to head pinball machine. if people are familiar with the game Joust that came out in the 80s, Harry did a head-to-head pinball machine in a single cabinet that's mechanical racing horses, and you're trying to hit bumpers to move your horse faster across the back box than your opponent. And it was sort of a novelty game then, and it would still be today, but it's amazing to see it in 1952. And it looks awesome. like well and uh actually challenger from godly also came out as a head-to-head two-player and alvin g and company also introduced uh later on uh i think it was a soccer yeah they have a soccer one to head and to end the jousting thing so uh there's there's been a number of different uh attempts at doing that it's like yeah it's the gift that keeps on giving harry was very instrumental for many, many decades and really influencing game design, not only with his contemporaries, but I think to your guys' point, many of what we think of as being the veteran designers of this era over the past 20 or 30 years who either inadvertently or directly wound up looking at some of the accomplishments that was done years prior and updating them to the point where they name signature ingredients in specific games. Yeah. I've seen here in 1953, he creates a game called Silver Skates. And what I found interesting about this, again, to get back to Pat Lawler, is it has four flippers. So we're in the flipper era because Harry Mabbs invents the flipper in 1947 on a game called Humpty Dumpty for another company, Gottlieb. But a couple years later, by this time, Harry Williams hires Harry Mabbs to come work for him at Williams. So there's twin Harrys. Some of the most influential early designers in pinball history are working for the same company, and they're both named Harry. But Harry Williams does a game called Silver Skates. I'm getting confused myself here. In 1953, but it has four flippers. and what's interesting is it has two flippers at the bottom like you would think in the normal orientation by this time the modern orientation that are controlled by flipper buttons on the cabinet but then there are two on the outside edges which would cover sort of like an out lane and those are not player controlled but they have little saucers in front of them and if the ball lands in that saucer it the ball is automatically flipped by those far edge flippers and i think oh, wow, this is basically Adam's Family Thing Flip, or it's Monster Bash's Phantom Flip, used later on in the 90s by Pat Lawler and George Gomez, and you see a rudimentary form of this in 1953. Have you played silver skates? I have not. I think that one of the challenges, in all honesty, you know, years ago, there used to be many wood rails that would be on display at a pinball expo, And I know that there are any number of different pinball hall of fames and museums and the like. But much of the games were, you know, with collectors, people like Russ Jensen, who was an avid restorer of older games. Joel Gilgoff back in California, I know, is featured in my pinball book. And there were so many others. And I think that much of that to the dismay of so many is that the games are just not as prevalent as they used to be. And whether or not the restorer market, collector market, I know that Mark Wehner prides himself, or at least used to, on refurbishing and restoring older games from the 1930s. So to your point, hopefully some of the listeners out there know some of these folks that may be a subset of the pinball community who are focused on games from the 30s, the 40s, the 50s. And maybe some of these will reemerge at some point in time at an event or in some locale. Yeah. And people will be able to, if not play them, at least see them. You know, I don't know if the Strong Museum has any number of these. So, yeah, I mean, I would absolutely encourage folks to try to track down any of the games, whether they're Harry's or anyone else's from that period of time. As I said, for many of them, it was somewhat disposable. I think that there were a number of designers who always made it very clear that they needed one of their games that they were designing as part of their collection.