Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Everything is Lit! Keith P Johnson and Jersey Jack Pinball

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 19m·analyzed·Mar 31, 2023
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.036

TL;DR

Silver Ball Chronicles profiles Keith P. Johnson's pivotal career in pinball programming across Williams, Stern, and Jersey Jack.

Summary

Ron Hallett and David Dennis of Silver Ball Chronicles interview Keith P. Johnson, a legendary pinball programmer who worked at Williams, Stern, and Jersey Jack Pinball. The episode traces Keith's career from his IRC-era introduction to pinball design through his seminal work on games like Revenge from Mars, Striker Extreme, and Sharky's Shootout, examining how industry relationships and his computer science background shaped modern pinball code.

Key Claims

  • Keith P. Johnson was hired at Williams in March 1998 after meeting Larry DeMar on an IRC channel where DeMar mentioned job openings

    high confidence · Keith directly quoted: 'I started hanging out on an IRC channel with a lot of pinball enthusiasts. At one point, Larry DeMar made a comment that Williams were looking for people. And I just asked him, hey, I might be interested. That was late 97.'

  • Keith joined the Revenge from Mars team in summer 1998 after Lyman Sheets Jr. requested him for the project during a company restructuring

    high confidence · Keith quoted: 'what happened was there was a big restructuring. That was in the summer of 98... Lyman asked Larry for me to be on the Revenge for Mars team.'

  • All Williams Pinball Division employees were laid off in October 1999, shortly after planning a Disney World vacation

    high confidence · Hosts state: 'Well, in October of 1999, everyone was let go at Williams, including Keith... shortly after that shutdown, a lot of those employees went to Disney World with the tickets that they bought six or eight months before that.'

  • Keith was hired at Stern through IRC contact with Lonnie Ropp, whom he had met at IFPA 3 in 1993

    high confidence · Keith quoted: 'most of us were still hanging out on IRC, and Lonnie Ropp started showing up. I originally met Lonnie probably back at IFPA 3 in 1993... I just basically asked him if there were any positions possibly available at Stern.'

  • Revenge from Mars sold 6,878 units and was released in January 1999 on Williams Pinball 2000 platform

    high confidence · Hosts state: 'This is the original sci-fi theme from January of 1999. It sells 6,878 units. This is using the Williams Pinball 2000 platform'

  • Keith programmed his first wizard mode on Revenge from Mars

    high confidence · Hosts state: 'This is where Keith Johnson would program his first wizard mode, the final mode in Revenge for Mars.'

  • Stern was run much more informally and chaotically compared to Williams, with engineering changes pushed in at the last minute

    high confidence · Keith quoted from 2008 TopCast interview: 'I think the biggest joke that Dwight and I had for a long time was that every day we'd see something that made us shake our heads and wonder how they're still in business, meaning Stern... It was just remarkable that the engineering that occurred at the last minute actually made it into a finished game.'

Notable Quotes

  • “I started hanging out on an IRC channel with a lot of pinball enthusiasts. At one point, Larry DeMar made a comment that Williams were looking for people. And I just asked him, hey, I might be interested.”

    Keith P. Johnson @ ~22:00 — Illustrates how Keith leveraged informal online community networks to break into the pinball industry during the pre-social media era

  • “what happened was there was a big restructuring. That was in the summer of 98. The spinning wheel division wasn't going to be under Larry's purview anymore. He was going to solely oversee pinball. Lyman asked Larry for me to be on the Revenge for Mars team.”

    Keith P. Johnson @ ~26:00 — Documents the organizational moment that shifted Keith from slots to pinball at Williams

  • “I think the biggest joke that Dwight and I had for a long time was that every day we'd see something that made us shake our heads and wonder how they're still in business, meaning Stern.”

    Keith P. Johnson @ ~35:00 — Reveals Keith's critical perspective on Stern's operational chaos compared to Williams' structured approach, recorded in 2008 after his departure

  • “most of us were still hanging out on IRC, and Lonnie Ropp started showing up. I originally met Lonnie probably back at IFPA 3 in 1993... I just basically asked him if there were any positions possibly available at Stern.”

    Keith P. Johnson @ ~32:00 — Shows how Keith secured his position at Stern using the same IRC community network that got him into Williams

  • “Everything was a bit of a joke. Now, around 2008, this is by the time that Keith Johnson was let go at Stern.”

    David Dennis @ ~36:00 — Provides context that Keith's critical comments about Stern came after he was already terminated from the company

Entities

Keith P. JohnsonpersonRon HallettpersonDavid DennispersonSilver Ball ChroniclesorganizationLonnie RopppersonLyman Sheets Jr.personLarry DeMarpersonDwight Sullivan

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Williams Pinball Division October 1999 shutdown marked industry transition point; employees laid off despite having booked Disney vacation as celebratory trip after Revenge from Mars launch

    high · Hosts state: 'everyone was like, oh, from the Williams Pinball Division... Well, shortly after that shutdown, a lot of those employees went to Disney World with the tickets that they bought six or eight months before that'

  • ?

    community_signal: IRC (Internet Relay Chat) served as critical networking platform for late-1990s pinball industry job placement and relationship-building before social media era

    high · Both Keith's Williams and Stern positions were secured through IRC connections with Larry DeMar and Lonnie Ropp respectively; hosts emphasize this as 'dark web back in the day'

  • ?

    community_signal: Silver Ball Chronicles podcast launched Patreon support model with tiered benefits ($3 thanks tier, $6 premium with stickers/Discord, $20 shirt tier) while maintaining free public feed availability

    high · Hosts announce: 'We've sold out. We've joined Patreon... The best tier, the tier where you get all the stuff, is the $6 a month tier... Our top tier, which is $20 a month, after three months gets a free Silverball Chronicles t-shirt'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Keith Johnson achieved tournament credibility through PAPA competition (B-division top qualifier at PAPA 3, first place doubles at PAPA 5), informing his game design perspective

    high · Hosts state: 'Keith was actually a top qualifier in B division... and he did a doubles tournament with Bo and Karen's at Papa 5 and finished in first place... he's a pretty decent pinball player'

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.420

0:00
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. The Pinball Network is online.
0:31
Launching. Silver Ball Chronicles. So I'm going to try this thing out, okay? A friend of mine who records voiceovers for medical stuff, are you having problems with hemorrhoids? We can help. So she gave me this idea. So I have this dog clicker. Okay? So let's say you're recording something and you're like, yes. You keep clicking it more times.
0:54
Yes. So then you can edit your, so I'm going to give that a try this time and see. That won't get annoying at all. Well, if you don't f*** this up, things will work out perfectly fine, Ron.
1:18
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles and with me is Ron Stairmaster Hallett. What's up fella? Yes, that is true, the stair master. The stair master. Would you like to tell everybody why your legs are on fire? My legs are fine.
1:56
It's my throat that's bothering me for some reason. You climbed how many flights of stairs? 42? 42 flights of stairs. You go up Corning Tower, which is the tallest building in Albany. And I have no idea what my time is. because by the time I got to the top, I looked out and it was snowing. And I was like, oh, got to get out of here. So did you stop halfway, get a hot dog? No, I did not stop. You did not stop. You went the whole way. Good for you. And you did that for a charity, right? Cystic fibrosis. Good for you, Ron, for getting out and doing that. But beyond you and your poor quality exercise, what have we all been doing, you and I? We've been watching all these new game reveals that are coming. They're coming in from all directions. All manufacturers. I would say pretty much any company that says their game is coming out in March, which is like all of them, I assume they will all be at Texas. This is a different story than the last couple of years, right, where we've sort of bumbled and stumbled our way from 2020 until today because of that thing that happened. So we're pretty excited to get to maybe more of a slightly normal feeling, if you will. It's been a year of normal, but I think we're getting into a real normal here. I can't wait until five years from now when we cover this in a future Silver Belt Chronicles episode. Well, what about Foo Fighters? That's coming out. That looks beautiful, doesn't it? That'll be in our Jack Danger episode, 20 years from now or 10 years from now or whatever. But the most important thing, Ron, that has happened besides all your whopper farming and climbing up stairs and saving the world from cystic fibrosis is that I purchased a James Bond premium. I thought you weren't going to get a premium. I'm getting a premium because I want the ball lock, because I want the light show and all the excitement around that. And you want Bond on a wand. And the art package is really cool. You Only Live Twice is actually among one of my favorite James Bond films because it's got that whole fight scene at the end in the volcano lair. Oh, you like ninjas. It's very typical, over-the-top James Bond, and that's why I love You Only Live Twice. You like ninjas, rockets, and what's his name? Donald Pleasence. Yes! I love Donald Pleasence. Donald Pleasence had cool lines like, We are now impregnable. Like five minutes before everyone breaks in. And then there's the scene where he's holding the cat, talking to James Bond, and there's explosions behind him, and the cat is freaking out, and he holds the cat's head because it wants to bolt from his hands, and he's still in the middle of acting. I'm afraid that's not in the script. You must stay there, Kitty. Well, we've sold out. We've joined Patreon. And welcome to our new patrons, William and David, who have joined us all over there. Most folk have gotten their first set of stickers if they've joined us on our second $6 a month crony, premium crony tier, as well as our LE cronies should be receiving their shirts. So cronies and not cronies? It's cronies. Cronies. You like cronies? Chronicles? I guess it could be cronies. Okay. If you are a Patreon, you can vote. But should it be a crony or a crony? I'm going to put that in right now. Crony makes it sound like we're some kind of gang or something. Or maybe that's what people want. I've got my cronies with me. Yeah, yeah. Join us over at patreon.com slash silverballchronicles. You can say thanks with a $3 a month crony or crony donation just to say thanks. The best tier, the tier where you get all the stuff, is the $6 a month tier. That's where, after three months, you get a free sticker. You can join our private Discord chat room. We have lots of questions and banter back and forth. It's becoming a little more regular chat area now, which is nice. But the biggest thing is ad-free access early to Silver Ball Chronicles. that's posted in the feed. That's before it goes to the public free feeds. Our top tier, which is $20 a month, after three months gets a free Silverball Chronicles t-shirt to cover up and be warm. Now, nothing else has changed with the podcast. Everything is still free over on the TPN feed and our dedicated feed. But if you do want to join in, you do want to say thanks, you can do that at patreon.com slash silverballchronicles. You can still join us over on Facebook This is where we will be active most of the time. We're posting all of our stuff, lots of pictures when the episodes are coming up, and you can shoot us a private message there if you would like. Also, take a moment and leave us a five-star review wherever you've found us, if it's in a podcatcher or Apple podcast or Google podcast or over on the This Week in Pinball Promoter database. Leave a comment. Give us a five-star review. We love that because it helps others find our podcast. Ron, you love t-shirts. Sure, yeah, I love t-shirts. They're under my sweater all the time. And you wear a shirt, what, like every day? Every day I have a t-shirt on. Where can they find our t-shirts? They can find them if they swing on over to silverballswag.com. A couple of different design choices, some exciting stuff. We've used some of that fancy Patreon money to pay for Randy Martinez to make us a special limited edition. Silverball Chronicles logo. Looks very cool. It's like a retro, clean, 1950s-looking space Silverball Chronicles name. I think it looks cool. What do you think? That's the guy who did Mandalorian. And he did my comic book pro that I have downstairs. For your Star Wars. My Star Wars, yes. Official Star Wars artist, for all your Star Wars and Mandalorian needs, did a design for us. And all we had to do was pay him for it. Isn't that amazing? That's amazing. So, corrections and comments from the previous episode or episodes.

  • Striker Extreme (January 2000) was the first newly designed game at Stern Pinball after the company acquired Sega Pinball from Gary Stern

    high confidence · Hosts state: 'Now, this is the first newly designed game at Stern Pinball, because it was originally Sega Pinball, and that has been sold to Gary Stern.'

    • person
    Williams Pinball Divisioncompany
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
    Revenge from Marsgame
    Striker Extremegame
    Sharky's Shootoutgame
    Attack from Marsgame
    PAPAorganization
    IFPAorganization
    Virginia Techorganization
    IRCtechnology
    Williams Pinball 2000technology
    Jonas Ackermanperson
    Ken Walkerperson
    Dan Langloisperson
    Randy Martinezperson
    George Gomezperson

    design_philosophy: Keith Johnson's programming contribution evolved from support role (Revenge from Mars) to lead software position (Striker Extreme, Sharky's Shootout), establishing his expertise in wizard mode and ball movement logic

    high · Hosts state on Revenge: 'Keith mostly worked on the ball movements, you know, created some modes in C++ but he was on the support team, he wasn't like a lead' vs. later games where he was co-lead

  • ?

    community_signal: Keith P. Johnson transitioned from Williams (structured, planned approach) to Stern (informal, last-minute engineering) in 1999-2000, representing significant shift in operational philosophy and methodology

    high · Keith quoted from 2008: 'every day we'd see something that made us shake our heads and wonder how they're still in business, meaning Stern... It was just remarkable that the engineering that occurred at the last minute actually made it into a finished game'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Keith Johnson's critical 2008 TopCast interview comments about Stern's chaos came after his termination from the company, providing important context for interpreting his perspective

    high · David Dennis notes: 'around 2008, this is by the time that Keith Johnson was let go at Stern. So that sort of context around this interview is also interesting because he does kind of throw a few jabs here and there'

  • ?

    announcement: Striker Extreme (January 2000) positioned as first newly designed game at Stern Pinball following Sega acquisition; marketed heavily on extreme sports/90s branding with X suffix

    high · Hosts note aggressive branding: 'Everything is X. X. Extreme earnings. X. Extreme mechanisms. X. Extreme action' and 'The X thing is, that screams 90s'

    • 7:56
    Uh-oh. We have corrections? We did something wrong? I don't know. We never really do anything wrong. Oh, yes. That's why David now has a dog clicker. This way, this thing, that will help me hopefully edit this thing a little bit faster than usual because, you know, quite frankly, I've been slacking. I have been super, super mega busy in all of the things that I've been doing here on Silver Ball Chronicles. But even more so busy is my real life. Things have been crazy. Oh, yeah, we're an award-winning podcast. Kind of. Not really. Actually, no. Silver medal, I guess. We're a silver medalist.
    8:42
    We're, what do they call it, second loser? First loser? First place loser, as the skull will tell you. As you can hear about in our Steve Ritchie episode, one of our Steve Ritchie episodes. So, comments and corrections from our previous episode. Ken Walker emailed us at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. He wanted to tell us about Dan Langlois' Dark Planet. He sent us an image of that and a local thing. He also found it amazing to learn about Mr. Langlois and, unfortunately, his early passing in the last episode. Dan Langlois, of course, was the Bally Midway designer who designed all those crazy, crazy pins back in the 80s. Also, a shout-out to Jonas Ackerman, who says, Love the podcast. Started listening to some of the specific episodes during the pandemic. I picked up this awesome hobby two years ago. Finally got my wife to agree to buying a pinball machine. Hey, good for you, Jonas, in having a spouse that's a partner in your relationship, as opposed to the butt of a joke. In May of 2020, he traded his Data East Jurassic Park, and he had this difficult time of getting a high score, Ron. That was until he listened to our episode about Data East, where you talked about the missile button. The missile button. And now he has the high score. It's a missile that's smart. It's a smart missile. I use that. I use that in the tournament. I just played in. I used the smart missile. Effectively. Jonas is from Sweden. Yeah, so if he's butchering your name, he's going to blame that. So I'll say Jonas Ackerman.
    10:24
    No, it's Jonas, like the Jonas Brothers. One of us will be right. Or we'll both be wrong. Also, I'm going to point this out here. He added a postscript. Can you read this for me, Ron? Oh, that's what PS stands for. I never, I always forget that. It says, P.S. Since my first real encounters with Canadians back in South Park, bigger, longer, and uncut, I thought the aboot stuff was made up. Thanks for clearing that up as well.
    10:53
    That's right. The things you figure out. Things you figure out. I didn't. I don't know what he's talking about. I don't know what I've cleared up for him. You say aboot. You're Canadian. I don't say aboot. Yes, you do. No, I don't. You're clearly Canadian, dude. I am. But we don't say aboot. A boot. Yes, you say it weird. All right, let's move on to the topic. Oh, the topic. Yeah. Let's get done with this. This is ridiculous. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, by the way, when I said silver medals, I meant the pinball awards. Oh, yes, that's right. You didn't even mention what that even meant. That's the award ceremony that TPN sets up to congratulate its people. That's great. What I wanted to do is make sure that I started an award ceremony to ensure that I could get myself an award. And it didn't work. And it's not working. And you're on the committee. I think I'm going to quit. Wow. Yeah, this is ridiculous. What can I say about Keith P. Johnson? He has four of the top pinball machines in the Pinball Awards Hall of Fame. He coded some of the most revered and most panned pinball codes in our hobby. In addition, Keith is one of the most important pieces in designing Jersey Jack's operating system and building their philosophy around pinball code and home use. I've enjoyed Keith's code. I've hated Keith's code. I've even begun to ask more of Keith's code by demanding just a little bit less. But let's begin with how Keith entered pinball. How did he change pinball? And what is he doing nowadays?
    12:38
    Let's talk everything is lit. Keith Johnson and Jersey Jack pinball. Should we start at the beginning, Ron, or should we start at the end? Always start at the beginning. Always start at the beginning because we tried that with a different podcast where we did somebody's career backwards, and it just confused everybody. Keith Johnson is from the D.C. area. Have you been to D.C.? Washington, D.C., yes. I've been to D.C. many times. The District of Columbia. Not a real state, apparently. That's where our capital is. That's where all of those people just love to go and have vacations and break windows and stuff. Yeah, I wouldn't take a vacation to Washington, D.C., but yeah. So, from the late 70s and 80s, like most of the young pinball folk at the time, most of the exposure to pinball was while on summer vacation. Keith, however, was much more into video games than pinball at the time. Keith says, and I will be the voice of Keith today. I love being the voice of it. Playing Keith Johnson, today is Ron Hallett Jr. As video games switched to Get the Next Quarter, which from back in the day, there was a period where you play something like Smash TV, and you kept having to put more money in to continue. Like the games wanted you to just keep going. Continue, continue, continue. They make the games so hard that you had to just keep putting money in. Yeah, those Konomi games were really big for that. It was all about just get the next quarter in there as opposed to like high score stuff. Yeah, who knows? They might still do that. Keith says, I kind of found myself going back to pinball around college. And college is when I started playing like really seriously. You know, eventually started going to tournaments and that kind of thing. Keith actually went to Virginia Tech and studied computer science, which is, I think, a pretty nerdy place to study computer science, right? Uh, for sure. I feel like Virginia Tech is like one of those ones where you're like, oh, Virginia Tech. It's not like MIT, but it's like, that just seems like one of those ones that sticks out in my head for some reason. Is it maybe because they had crappy commercials in the 90s or something? I don't know. I guess I should be the expert being the American here, but I don't know. Yeah, but you're also like an IT computer nerd. Well, do you have, like, the University of Toronto Computer Science or something? Yeah, Waterloo. University of Waterloo is big with computer science. All right. University of New Brunswick is huge with cybersecurity and stuff like that. We have a really big technology hub here in my city. Wow, New Brunswick. You named yourself after a bowling company. The bowling company named themselves after us because, quite frankly, everything is awesome in New Brunswick, especially trees. After graduating, Keith spent some time bouncing around some companies like Advanced Systems, which was like a Microsoft support shop. He also worked with companies that specialized in university class scheduling software, financial aid coordination, and other exciting IT-related things. Can you relate to that, Ron, after you first graduate? You just sort of bumble around in sort of information technology and kind of eventually find your way? Well, I wasn't really a programmer, and the place I started off with, I'm still there. So I didn't really bounce around. So I guess I failed. That's unusual, though. That is unusual. People switch jobs a lot nowadays, and we'll get into that with Keith Johnson. Keith would frequent pinball tournaments around this time, and he was often seen in the big leagues of PAPA. And PAPA is what, Ron? The Professional Amateur Pinball Association. This was the big league, right? This was really kind of the predecessor to IFPA, the International Pinball Flipper Association. This, like, Papa was a big, big, big deal. And we've sort of seen it kind of fall off a lot more here in the last, what, five to seven years? Yeah, well, since Pinberg isn't around anymore. Yeah, Pinberg was really the last sort of hurrah for the Papa style. Well, not the Papa. Oh, hold on. We're going to get corrections up the a** here. Papa, there's the Papa tournament, and then there's the Tinberg tournament. They were both run by the Replay Foundation, but they're totally different types of tournaments. Ah, okay. So Keith was actually a top qualifier in B division, so not A division, but B division, and that was at Papa 3 in New York City. He also did a doubles tournament with Bo and Karen's at Papa 5 and finished in first place. So, I mean, he's a pretty decent pinball player, would you say? He is. He's still a pretty decent pinball player. So when you're ingrained in pinball, you tend to sort of build relationships and friends and you chit-chat and all that stuff. I'm sure you're buddies with all the designers at all the big companies. Isn't that right? That's right. You know all of them? Best friends? You have coffee with Steve Ritchie? Oh, yeah. Well, my dad and him are like best buddies. At least that my dad thinks so. Yeah, I mean, even programmers, right? You're friends with some of the programmers. You bump into them from time to time. They sleep in your spare bedroom.
    17:45
    I don't know about that. But yes, I do know programmers, but I knew them before they even started at the company. And that's exactly it, right? As you're ingrained in the hobby, you tend to sort of bleed through the hobby, especially being as small one as it is. Well, back in the 90s, it was a little bit different because we didn't quite have social media as we knew it today. But we did have a program called IRC. Do you remember that, Ron? I think it was Internet Relay Chat or something like that. It was like a weird, huge chat room thing. That was the dark web back in the day. IRC. And Keith says, I started hanging out on an IRC channel with a lot of pinball enthusiasts. At one point, Larry DeMar made a comment that Williams were looking for people. And I just asked him, hey, I might be interested. That was late 97. So I went over to Williams during Expo 97 and met with a bunch of people and talked to them. It was mostly for slots because there weren't any pinball openings at the time. Yeah, so he just wants to get a foot in the door. He's in this chat room IRC dark web with some of the other pinball folk, and that's where he sort of got his foot in the door. Well, Keith will join Williams in March of 1998 in the slot division, working on programming the slots and learning the ropes, but he didn't really enjoy it at slots. He really wanted to be in the pinball division. So he used his time there to make friends in the pinball division and build on the relationships he already had from being on the pinball tournament scene with people like Lyman Sheets Jr. So, of course, I've mentioned before, right, relationships and getting involved in people is how you get ahead in life, folks. and Keith knew that and he spent a lot of time getting to know those individuals so that eventually he could shift into the pinball division. Sometimes you just need an opportunity and that opportunity was finally given in the summer of 1998. So Keith says, so what happened was there was a big restructuring. That was in the summer of 98. The spinning wheel division wasn't going to be under Larry's purview anymore. He was going to solely oversee pinball. Lyman asked Larry for me to be on the Revenge for Mars team. So they offered me the position. And stinkers swim with pinball. There wasn't going to be any going back to slot machine if I moved to pinball. But I was like, well, I want to do pinball. Yeah, so, I mean, the bread and butter at Williams, right? The thing that still kept Williams going was that slot division, the spinning reels, he called it. That was where all the money was made. That's where all the job security was. Pinball was not known for its job security, especially in the late 90s, right? Yeah, that was the rough time. Why would you want to do that? Well, you know what? He wanted to do pinball, and he was willing to take the risk. So that brings us to Revenge from Mars, the first game that Keith P. Johnson would work on where he'd cut his teeth in pinball programming. This is the original sci-fi theme from January of 1999. It sells 6,878 units. This is using the Williams Pinball 2000 platform, designed by George Gomez, art by John Yossi, Greg Freres. Now, this is where we get into the mud here. Animation by a large team, Adam Ryan, Scott Slomany, Jack Linden, Scott Sanders, and Dave Mueller. Sound by Dan Fortin and then the software team which was also large and has some of the greats Lyman Sheets Jr. Dwight Sullivan, Keith P. Johnson and Graham West Keith mostly worked on the ball movements, you know, created some modes in C++ but he was on the support team, he wasn't like a lead on this game and this game was a sequel to Attack from Mars yeah, which is like coveted as being one of the greatest Bally Williams games of all time. One that you have in your basement, isn't that correct? Yep. Do you sometimes sleep under it and just kind of cuddle it a little bit? I don't sleep under my machines. That's weird. Okay, because a lot of pinball people really, you know, especially the tournament nerds, they really love that game. It's in the basement, a really, really cold floor. That would be very uncomfortable. This is where Keith Johnson would program his first wizard mode, the final mode in Revenge for Mars. So that's where he gets his excitement for wizard modes, maybe. In celebration for the release of Revenge for Mars and Pinball 2000, a bunch of Williams employees coordinated a trip to Disney World. Everyone bought and paid for their tickets right after the launch of Revenge for Mars, and they were planning on going on that vacation sometime toward the end of October that year. Well, in October of 1999, everyone was let go at Williams, including Keith. Well, everyone was like, oh, from the Williams Pinball Division. That's correct, yeah. So we've talked about this many, many, many times throughout the podcast, the sort of shutdown and collapse of the Williams Pinball Division. Well, shortly after that shutdown, a lot of those employees went to Disney World with the tickets that they bought six or eight months before that. Could you imagine?
    23:06
    Everyone in the Pinball Division was talking to Midway. Keith, in fact, was talking to Midway as well, but he would turn down that job. But he would end up at a company called Stern. And Midway was the video game division of Williams. Or actually, by that point, I think they were WMS Industries. That's their official name. Keith says, most of us were still hanging out on IRC, and Lonnie Ropp started showing up. I originally met Lonnie probably back in IFPA 3 in 1993. then I'd seen him at expos and stuff like that. I just basically asked him if there were any positions possibly available at Stern. And probably the next week, I was in his office. We talked for about three or four hours. Yeah, so right there, you know, being in sort of the back channel of the dark web of IRC, Keith was able to jump in and chat with Lonnie. So he was able to sort of get himself kind of ahead of the game. Even though he was on vacation in Disney World, he was hired right after Dwight Sullivan, who didn't go on that vacation. The shift to Stern is something that we've talked a few times, especially in our Dwight Sullivan episode, where it became really kind of nutty, the differences between Stern and Williams. I pulled this quote from a TopCast interview with Keith Johnson, which was recorded right around the fall of 2008.
    24:37
    Keith says, I think the biggest joke that Dwight and I had for a long time was that every day we'd see something that made us shake our heads and wonder how they're still in business, meaning Stern. It was just amazing how things came together and got designed, like how things were pushed in at the last minute. It's just remarkable that the engineering that occurred at the last minute actually made it into a finished game. Things just weren't as structured and as planned out as they were. Williams. That was kind of the joke, right, was that everything was in a shoestring at Stern. Everything was a bit of a joke. Now, around 2008, this is by the time that Keith Johnson was let go at Stern. So that sort of context around this interview is also interesting because he does kind of throw a few jabs here and there in that interview about Stern, kind of about how casual and informal it was. You know, Keith came from the almighty Williams, which I find funny because he was only really there for a year or two. But it's just interesting that he has so much knowledge and insight, you know, and how the industry should be run by a guy who's only been in the industry for like three years. You know, Keith is a pretty amazing person, and we'll see that through there. But there's some context within that interview and his quotes that I think is sort of important to remember when we're going through today's episode. Now, Striker Extreme was the next game in January of 2000. That's the sports soccer theme. This has an unknown amount of units because there's no need to release those. It's designed by Joe Balser, art by Kevin O'Connor. It does dots by Kurt Anderson, sound by Kyle Johnson, who worked on a lot of games with Data East and Alvin G. and Stern, kind of in this era, but has sort of since disappeared. And software was lead by Lonnie Ropp, Oren Day, and Keith Johnson. So Keith has to come aboard and learn an entirely new software set, an entirely new industry, an entirely new company in the industry, because things are run completely different and by the seat of the pants at Stern. Now, this is the first newly designed game at Stern Pinball, because it was originally Sega Pinball, and that has been sold to Gary Stern. Yep, and that's why there are no production numbers, because they are no longer a public company, i.e. Sega, i.e. Data East. They are private, and they do not and have not released any of their production numbers. Which is really annoying. I'd love to know how many striker extremes are out there. Or should I say, well, technically, the LEs where they have a set number, they say how many of those there are. Yeah, that's right. We know how many of the top tier ones are. But it's just fun to know how many of these pins are out there. But, of course, that doesn't happen anymore. I don't mind Striker Extreme. Is it a good one? It's a fun. I think it's a good shooter.
    27:33
    And you can tell it's the first Stern game because they plaster Stern everywhere they can. I think the guy's wearing a Stern jacket. He's like, Stern. Everything is Stern.
    27:42
    And Extreme is spelled with an X. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Extreme. The X thing is, that screams 90s. In the 90s, everything was extreme. Everything was with an X. Anything that ended with an S was a Z. Yeah, Zed. Yep. Now, this had a goalie toy behind some drop targets. Yep. Reminiscent of a trying-to-be-better-but-not-better World Cup soccer. It's not World Cup soccer, no. Not even close. They reused the play field for the NFL game they did. where you could pick what team you wanted, and you'd get that one. I know someone who had a New York Giants one, and I played that one first, and then I played Striker Extreme. I'm like, wait a minute, this is the same play field. This is the same play field. Yeah, it's got the guy in the play field, and he's wearing his stern sweater.
    28:38
    Yeah, this is Jersey. Jersey's got a collar, though. It's a very, very fancy collar. It's got a lot of ball poppers. This game's got like two ball poppers.
    28:50
    Doesn't really do it for me. I haven't seen one of these. I see them for sale from time to time. But this is that Arrow. How does it not do it for you if you've never even played it? Boo. I got to boo you on that. Boo. Because it just doesn't. I don't like this picture.
    29:06
    I don't like the picture. What is the Flyers saying? What is Stern going to do for their first game? How are they going to promote this? Oh, yes. This is the dollars and cents. People love our flyers here. I'm just curious.
    29:20
    Oh, God. Yes. Everything is X. Extreme earnings. X. Extreme mechanisms. X. Extreme action. And it's custom speech available in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Yes. The countries that actually care about soccer. It would be funny if it said custom speech also available in Australia or something like that. Yeah. Or Canadian. Yeah. That would be funny. Yeah. If he Canadian, it would be all hockey terms. Goal, eh?
    29:49
    He got it in the net there. He's getting down there, giving 110% in the corners, keeping his elbows up. Instead of stating it hard, they would just say score. Score!
    29:59
    Yep, it has a simulated corner kick, an upper third flipper. That's an important thing. A throw-in shot. It has a three-choice skill shot. A stadium multi-ball release mechanism. It has a dual flipper return lane. Wow, they're advertising just the dual flipper returns.
    30:18
    That's exciting. Defeat all countries to gain championship status, then play celebration multiball. In other words, beat Germany and then get victory laps. Sounds very familiar.
    30:32
    It does, it does. Now, the best part about this pinball machine is the Union Jack is misidentified as belonging to England. No, that's not right. Yeah, the English, the Union Jack is the flag of the United Kingdom, which consists of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As being part Irish, I'm offended. You should be. But isn't, like, the most powerful part of you the Italian part? Yeah, it's in attitude and physical appearance, yes. Yes, because when it comes down to it, anybody who's Italian needs to tell you they're Italian like a million times. Yeah, I've done that. Well, my great-grandparents are from Italy, so that's pretty Italian. The next game was Sharky's Shootout, which was a billiards theme from September of 2000. And another game I like. Oh, God. What? This is the Stern White Star Board as well. This one's designed by John Borg, art by John Yosey, dots by Mark Galvez, sound by Kyle Johnson, software, again, Lonnie Robb Dwight and Keith P. Johnson on backup there. Wait a minute, Dwight Johnson and Keith Johnson? Or Dwight Sullivan and Keith Johnson? Dwight Sullivan. We need to be informative here. We can't assume people know the names. I'm just going to make this up. People, people. No, we don't make anything up here. Now, Sharky's Shootout was originally supposed to be another game. I can't remember. It was actually for Sega. There's one that exists, too. I've seen it. It's literally the same play field, and it has another woman on it, like a celebrity.
    32:05
    And people are probably shouting what it is right now. You should know this. You're on Splitterball Chronicles. I can't remember. Yeah, back when we spoke about John Norris, it was originally his game which ended up sort of going awry, and they wanted to make it very much a connected online kind of thing. He did Bad Girls, too. Did you do Cubalt Wizard? I know he did Bad Girls. He must love pool. Bad Girls is so good. He must love pool. Bad Girls is so good. So this features Jeanette Lee. Yes, so Jeanette Lee was a pool shark at the time, a professional pool player. So this was kind of like before poker players were the cool thing. It was very much of a billiards thing, and she was a really big name. She was like the Black Widow or something. Yeah, she was the biggest, yeah, probably male or female star, and she had her own gimmick. Yeah, she was the Black Widow. She always had the glove on. It's like Michael Jackson. And it's Sharky's Shootout. We love pool themes. This had this special tournament kit, right, which was that experiment that they wanted to do, which ended up not going anywhere, sadly. Easy to install tournament kit. Oh, they used the tournament kits for a while. But they were, like, trying to be, like, golden tea, right? Like, that was kind of the idea, wasn't it? They would have the extra topper thing that's a tournament play on it, and they would have, like, some of them had, like, a Betabright display, like a ticker, and would go across, and I thought it was a neat idea. They had like a tournament button. Yeah, this was a really cool game. It was a variation on 8-Ball Deluxe, which for some reason has been done a billion times, but each time was kind of a little bit better.
    33:46
    Game features a skill shot, a drain post save, which they trademarked, outlane post saves, which they trademarked. Basically, they're just pop-up posts. Yeah, they were just pop-up on the outlanes. Seven bank memory drop target. A mystery ball diverter. Eight ball and nine ball modes. Three multi-ball modes. Great visible pop action because it sucks when your pop action is not visible. Makes you think like you're doing something if you can see it. Like Attack from Mars would be like invisible pop action because you don't really see it. The black widow drop target and the web final mode. Yeah, this is Dennis Creasel's favorite stern pinball machine. Did you know that? Dennis Creasel of the Pinball Show. Yes, award-winning Pinball Show.
    34:39
    Chill City, baby. Chill City. Yes. Not bitter. Now, he didn't do a whole lot on this game. It was mostly lamp effects, some of the minor coding and things like that, because at this time a lot of the stern pinball ethos was just stay alive right So all hands on deck on most of the pinball machines Everybody kind of do as much as you can to get it out the door as fast as you can But one game where Keith got a little more fun, a little more to do, was High Roller Casino by John Norris. And this was, of course, from 2001.
    35:23
    Art by John Yossi and Kevin O'Connor. Dots by Mark Galvez, Sound by Kyle Johnson, Software by Keith P. Johnson, Lonnie Ropp, and Dwight Sullivan. The slot machine with the Dot Matrix display reel in here is very cool.
    35:39
    Yes, my co-host for my other podcast, the Slam Tilt Podcast, my co-host Bruce Nightingale loves this game. He loves High Roller Casino. Where would you rank High Roller Casino amongst casino games?
    35:58
    I can't even answer that. There's so many. There is a lot of them. But there's a lot of stuff in here. There is.
    36:07
    Be a winner with High Roller Casino. Game features, craps, slot machine, roulette, poker, high, low, and blackjack 21. These flyers are very uninspiring They're very uninspiring Where is the cool like It's industry defining Going to change the world All that Where is that? There's none of that It is literally like Tell them what's in the game Just move on to the next thing Right? Point at the mech There's no Animated rolling wind wheel Pick your prize The slot machine Ramp capture thing there is pretty unique. That's a pretty unique toy because it's the first one with sort of like the dot matrix display in the play field, kind of not in the physical play field, but like under the glass. It's really cool. Yeah, they don't really use that anymore. That would be kind of cool if they did. I mean, they used it for what, Star Wars? They had the LCD, the little screen. Yeah, that's a Jersey Jack thing where they take mechs out and they just put a bigger iPad in. That's kind of their thing now. So, if this is Bruce Nightingale's, who didn't finish anywhere on the Pinball Awards, if this is his favorite game, would you classify it as one of yours up there, too?
    37:29
    Really? Wow, that was really quick. I didn't even get an odd one. One of the many games we disagree about. Wow. Mark that one down, folks. Now, Keith would say that programming on the White Star system, compared, obviously, to the Williams system was incredibly tough. Things like trying to cycle coils, dim lights, blink lights, coordinate sounds was incredibly, incredibly difficult.
    37:57
    And that's where he really draws the line in the sand, saying it's really, really hard to program on this system. Keith said that system was basically written in the laser war era, when Data East first started out. It was like original 6803 code. As time goes on, more and more gets added, but a lot of the code was the same. It's like Band-Aids on Band-Aids on Band-Aids. I thought I could be wrong with this. I thought the White Star system was primarily just like an assembly. Yeah, so it was done in C++, I think. I thought it was assembly. I thought it was just ones and zeros, baby. Yeah, yeah, but that was the biggest thing. The other thing was, you know, when you've got this technology that started at Data East, and it's moved into Sega, and now it's moved into Stern, and there's been restructures and people have left and come in. So a lot of the knowledge that is built on like, oh, the reason we program like this on this system is because of this legacy issue that happened 15 years ago. Well, a lot of those people had left. So Keith spent most of his time trying to reinvent and relearn how this board set works because he wasn't happy getting what he was getting out of it. Keith is an amazing person because he wants to push himself further and he wanted to push the technology further. So he had to learn more. The system was somewhat limiting, but to be fair, it was also very reliable.
    39:18
    White Star was a very reliable system. Yeah, I don't, I mean, what was the weak point in there? Some of the drivers maybe if a coil got stuck on, but that was really it. I mean, the thing that always bugged me about those systems is Williams used triax so they could like dim the lights in cool ways and do stuff like that. like Data East, Sega, CERN, it was just relays. It's either off or on. Click, click. Keith wanted to make sure that he could do more with it. He wanted to make more. He wanted to push it further and harder. And he wanted to make a better game. And the system was limiting him. So he had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to manipulate that system to do what it wanted to do. That's why Keith Johnson's an awesome person. He's not happy with just mediocre. He wants to make things amazing. The next game that he worked on, he only worked on support with this one. This was Austin Powers. This is the licensed comedy spy movie theme, June of 2001. This is another White Star system. This is designed by John Borg and Lonnie Ropp. The software here, Lonnie Ropp was the lead. Keith did a lot of the support on it. As mentioned, he did a lot of the display effects, the blinking of the lights and the DMD sort of coordination stuff. he removed a lot of the quotes that Mike Myers didn't necessarily want, as well as some of the visuals that they didn't approve of from the movie theater company, or the movie company, the film company. For example, there was a match animation that was the scene in the tent from the second Austin Powers movie where they're, like, doing the thing with the shadow. Do you remember that? I never saw the second one. Oh, man. I didn't see the first one. I didn't see the second or third one. The second one's the best one. Well, there's a part where there's like a light behind somebody, and you can see their shadows, and they're putting things in and out of Austin's butt, and that was where the match animation would come out of. There was also a bonus X animation with a lot of vagina, where she would have her silhouette, and she would take off her bra, but a lot of that was not approved by the movie's IP holder, and it was all removed. Apparently there's a home ROM that exists with these animations, but nobody knows where it is. You like Austin Powers, though, right? It's a great game. It shoots good. And, man, they used it for stuff later on. It's got the crossbow that was used later in Walking Dead. It has the time machine, which is basically the ring in Lord of the Rings. Yes, that's right, and they also reused that in Rush. We used the, I think the toilet is from, I think that's the South Park toilet. Yes, yes. It had the coolest thinner ever. It did, which was actually the mini-me toy. Now, I've never played one where he wasn't broken. His feet always get ripped off, but it's still cool. Now, Keith really started to flat-out run with the Simpsons Pinball Party from February of 2003. This is the licensed cartoon theme on the Stern White Star board set.
    42:35
    This was designed by Joe Balser, but Keith Johnson also had a lot of input into this design. Art by Kevin O'Connor and Margaret Hudson. Dots by Mark Galvez. Sound by Dan Forden and the master, Chris Granter. And software, the only person on this, the real main lead, Keith P. Johnson. So they got a little extra time on designing this game. and you can certainly tell that it was a big, big deal. Simpsons certainly benefited from the extra time. It was the game I had the most time to work on. It was longer than the normal game time.
    43:10
    And that quote was probably from TopCast, right? Yes, it was. I'm thinking he had more time to do some of his future games we'll be talking about. If you look at all those other games, right, the turnovers were like months trying to get those games out there,
    43:24
    working a bunch of people on games at once. Well, right around this time, sort of the philosophy had changed a little bit at Stern, right? They were opening up a little bit more to the homeowner purchasing games, not just the bars. And the style of games certainly did change. Yeah, not according to Gary Stern, though. They did not acknowledge the homeowner for quite a while after this. And they still really try to struggle on that. that they don't necessarily talk about homeowner, even though I think that's all they do. I would say it was probably after Jersey Jack came around, and around maybe 2012 or after that Stern finally acknowledged the home buyer. Yeah. One of the biggest controversies of this game, Ron, was that the speech was done by Nancy Cartwright, Hank Azura, and Dan Castanelta. Oh, my God. Okay, I think it's spelled wrong. I believe it's Dan Castellana, Nancy Cartwright, and Hank Azaria.
    44:28
    Right. Yes. That's where most of the speech comes from. How is that controversial? No, but everybody was angry because they were all sort of the male characters. There were no female characters, and there was no Lisa, there was no Marge. Well, the thing is, remember, this was in 2003, and it's when the voice actors for this show were getting an obscene amount of money, and there was no way they were going to be able to afford all of them. So they decided they needed Homer because he was the star of the show by that point, and you need Bart. So you get Dan Castellana and then you get Nancy Cartwright. So who are you going to get? And you can afford one more.
    45:06
    So are you going to get Marge Stimson, Patty and Selma? Are you going to get Lisa because there's this one woman who does her voice? Or are you going to get Hank Azaria who does like about six or seven different people? Right, he does comic book guy, he does that poo. He does me. Krusty, I'm in the game, you know. Yes. This, I owned this game. This was the second sort of major pinball machine that I owned. I put probably 2,000 plays on this game. I played this game a lot. Did you ever get to the super-duper mega-extreme wizard mode? No, I didn't. Because Keith Johnson didn't design this game for me. Keith Johnson designed this game for him and Bear and Bo and Karen's. But I did cheat as much as I could, so I put it on five ball for a very long time. After I had gotten to a certain point where I was just banging my head against it. We'll talk about that in a minute, but let's dive into the flyer here. Yeah, they had the actual art crew from the show did a lot of the art.
    46:08
    Yeah, which I'm shocked. The art looks great. Wonderful. It looks fabulous. Even Bart says, looking fabulous. I can't do Bart. Fabulous!
    46:19
    Underachiever and proud of it, to use an early quote. It was packed. This game was packed. It had a lot of stuff. It was so packed they reused a lot of this stuff for the Simpsons Kooky Carnival Redemption game they did later on. There's so much stuff in this game. And this game has a lot of amazing bits and pieces, but it also has a lot of, like, frustrating, annoying stuff to it as well. It has five flippers. Five. Five flippers. So it's got your regular two at the bottom on your Italian bottom, right? out lane, in lane, and two flippers at the bottom with your slings. Then it's got pops really close on the left side. It's got drop targets on the right side. With the capture hole behind it, which is your itchy and scratchy shot. It has a really wonderful orbit with a spinner on it on the right side. Into a captive ball on the right side with Bart on a skateboard, which is really cool. And it has the ramp, really kind of like the only actual ramp. No, it has a side ramp. You just Never hit it. No. I'll get into that in a minute. It has a garage. You'll be hitting that a lot. Yes. Then there's the garage in the middle, which is actually a really cool little bash toy. You bash it. It flips open like a garage door. And there's a mini ramp in behind that that goes up over into a vertical up kicker. So it pops the ball up to the most amazing upper play field to ever be designed. I'm saying it. It's good. Even I'll say that. It's amazing. Two flippers. loop shot. In weird positions. A TV thing with a display. Another ramp to a couch.
    47:53
    Couch lock. Oh my goodness. I love this game. And if you don't flip, it goes down kind of this metal monorail thing down to your right flipper. Then underneath that is kind of like the quickie mart shot, which is like a weird loop shot. A little bit like the Deadpool Colossus shot. Isn't that the guy that's under the ramp? Then there's the worst designed side ramp ever in Pimple. You can hit it. Good for you. It is terrible.
    48:27
    It's steep, and it's a sharp turn, and it's in a weird location. It should have been further down the play field and had more of a clue. The funny thing is if you disable the garage, that's the shot you have to hit to get up to the upper play field. Good luck. What's worse is that is that shot is so critical to getting really far in the game, and it's so excruciatingly, frustratingly terrible. And, you know, people are like, well, you've got to get better at pinball. Or, you know, there's lots of players that are pretty good at that. Well, you know what? We're not all Travis Murie, and we're not all Bowen Cairns. Like, give me a break here.
    49:06
    Terrible design. Travis will be happy you used his name with Bowen. Yeah. Yeah, Travis is pretty awesome. He's a good dude. Did you know he finished third at InDisc? Yes, I did.
    49:20
    He's a big deal. Did you know there's silos on this game? The silos. Pop bumpers are silos, which is a holdover from the original Simpsons spin ball machine. And I love shots, orbit shots through pops. I'm a sucker for that. You got that in Tron. I'm a big, big, big sucker for that. and this game I think does it really, really well. It's very fun.
    49:43
    This is one of the best games I think Stern has ever made, even though it has that terrible crippling shot. But there's a lot of really cool bits and pieces in here. But the best thing, the thing that makes it... Because it sold a lot. They did a ton of runs of these things. They did, God, at least five, six runs of this game. They could run it again today and still sell a boatload of them. Guaranteed. But the problems that Joe Balser did with his design of the play field, a couple of things that don't necessarily work in there, and that's kind of the story of Joe Balser anyway, right? He's like the king of clunk. Wow. It was the code. It was the code that made this game something special, and that's all on Keith Johnson. What do you think of the code on this game? You stack everything. You stack. This is where everything is lit, everything is blinking. You stack as many modes as possible, then you get in a multiball, and literally every shot's lit. And every shot is a jackpot. And it's so deep it'll take you 45 minutes, if you're good, to get to the wizard mode. It takes you forever. Okay, so let's break down the parts of the play field. And alien invasion is awesome, even I will admit that. Alien invasion is something else. So let's break this down piece by piece. We're going to look at the play field here. Can you tell that David really likes this game? I love this game. We're not talking about Sharky Shootout here, folks. We're talking about The Simpsons. Let's see, I like the fact that Keith Johnson took the fact that this game stops the ball a ton and used that for Alien Invasion, where you have to park balls all over the play field. Brilliant, brilliant. So the way it starts is that there's multiple different, like, mini wizard modes. This is kind of where the mini wizard mode was kind of born, right? Keith was able to bend this machine's code in a way that made it really interesting. So you've got, like, itchy and scratchy. So there's four itchy and scratchy modes. You shoot the drop targets, and you lock the ball in the scoop behind it, or the saucer. And those are all different multiballs. So you do all of those, and then you get to a special little wizard mode. It's not the final wizard mode. It's just a special wizard mode. Now, on the left orbit through the pops, you can get to pretzel multiball, where I think there's like 25 of the Cletus kids.
    52:06
    You've got to shoot that 25 times, and you get to pretzel multiball, which I never got to, even on five balls, even when I was like, I'm not going to do anything but shoot the left orbit. I still never got there, because it's a tough shot. Then you've got Bart Simpson modes, right? targets, loops, bumpers, and ramps. So then when you do that, you get to... God, what is that mode called?
    52:36
    You get to another mode. Don't ask me. This is the problem. See, this is the problem with the game. Now, the most fun one is when you get to the right spot.
    52:46
    No. What's the one where they go with the backwards flippers? Oh, yeah. It does reverse. Yeah. The right flipper is the left flipper. The left flipper is the right flipper. Yeah, so you've got to collect all the shots for that. Then the upper play field has its shots, right? So you've got different modes. And I think this is probably the best part of the game. You've got Duffman, which is shoot the Duffman ramp. You've got, and every time you shoot it, it's got the amazing Duffman.
    53:17
    Oh, my God, it's amazing. Oh, and I guess Homer is. It's Dan Castellanata. I didn't, I don't know. Yeah, see, I told you this year. That is weird.
    53:25
    Yeah. So there's Homer's day, and the most brilliant part of this is that the shots correspond to Homer's day. So Homer starts his day at the power plant, so you've got to shoot the pops. And then he leaves work and he goes to the bar, so you've got to shoot the Moe's ramp shot. Then he drives home, which is terrible, and you go to the garage, and you go up and you watch television, and you sit on the couch. Moe's tab, Moe's speaking. I have a strike, man.
    53:55
    There's Willie's woes where you have to shoot the bully and then take him to the school. There's Wiggum and the snake where you chase around snake around the play field and his shots change. This is one of my favorite quotes ever where he steals the VCR and he looks at it, oh, no, beta.
    54:18
    No one will get that anymore, but it was hilarious at the time. take my word for it. Bart's Day, that's another mode. So, what's really neat about this is before this era, before this game, most of the things were like shoot this shot four times and something happens. And shoot this shot six times and something happens. Now we're getting into kind of mode-based games that have objectives. But like on steroids. Yeah, you had those before, but yeah, this one, this is one of your original super deep games. That's going to take you 45 plus minutes to get through. Krusty's Last Stand, you shoot the Krusty Spinner like, stop the monorail, so you've got to take the monorail ramp a bunch of times. So you do all of those, and then you get to Alien Invasion, which is one of the greatest mini-wizard modes of all time. So basically, you get a two-ball multi-ball, you've got to lock both of those balls. Then it releases the two balls, and it gives you a third ball out of the auto launcher. So now you've got three balls in play. You've got to lock all three balls somewhere off the play field. Then when you lock all three of those, it gives you the three balls back plus a fourth ball. And it does that until like five balls or something, and you lock all five of them. And it is so much fun. But playing Alien Invasion is not where you get all your points. Where you get all your points is you try to start every one of those modes. You try to start all of the multiballs, and you try to start all of the hurry-ups, And then everything just gets lit and crazy, and you're doing quadruple jackpots, and it's crazy. But it's sort of like if you eat candy every single day, it starts to become not that tasty after a while, you know? And then when you can't get to the super-duper mega-extreme wizard mode. Which is completing all of those modes, all of the other multiballs, all of the... And you have to complete them, too. You can't just sort of doop your way through it. Yeah, you've got to actually finish, yeah. And you have to have, so during the couch multiballs, so if you get up there and you get on the couch, you lock three balls on the couch, you have to shoot, I think it's four jackpots, then go back up on the couch to get a super. You need to get five supers before you can even get to that final wizard mode. By the way, that's what Jonas was talking about. He said cage. What? I didn't hear that.
    56:35
    So one of the other things that this game really struggles with is the fact that it is bash the garage door all day. Yeah. Shoot the garage up to the couch. Shoot the garage. Up to the couch. Over and over and over. Now, it is fun, but once you get about 1,000 games in the home environment, you start to go, I think I want to move this pin on. And then by the time you get to 1,500, you're like, well, this was fun. What do you say? I never... Again, it's play field first, and I just never like the way it's shot. With the exception of the upper play field. You deal with the play field because the code is so good. Now imagine if the play field were amazing and the code were amazing. That brings us to Lord of the Rings. The licensed fantasy movie epic theme, December of 2003. I think we generally kind of know that this sold around 5,000 units and I think that was spilled by George Gomez in a podcast years ago, I think it was in the Top 10 they had like, oh god, another one they had six or seven different ones, then they had the LE later on, just went forever it was another one of those pins that just went forever I remember an interview, I think it was Gary Stern, they had to choose, I think it was either Lord of the Rings or Matrix like one of the sequels the sequel. They dodged the bullet on that. If it wasn't the original Matrix, it would have been like the Matrix 2 or whatever the hell they were up to at the time.
    58:09
    Yep. And they... And Gary, he said, Lord of the Rings. This is considered to be like one of the greatest pinball machines of all time, is it not? It's good. Designed by George Gomez and Keith P. Johnson. It's got art by Jerry Vanderskelt, Kevin O'Connor, Margaret Hudson, dots by Mark Galvez, sound by Chris Graner, and the software, Keith P. Johnson. So he's working on these, this game and the Simpsons sort of kind of overlapping towards the end of the Simpsons. But this is the greatest fan layout of all time. No. I mean, that's attack for Mars. That's attack for Mars, yes. This one, I'm sorry, that left ramp that kind of goes half up and then comes back down at you, that disqualifies it. Or the Gollum shot where you hit it and all of a sudden it just blows through. It won't stick. Yeah, yeah, that's true. But you know, the greatest fantasy of all time is now an epic pinball machine for all ages. Wow. Yes. Look at that. It's a wonderful, wonderful game. Now, I've played, when I first got into pinball, you know, you're kind of looking up, like, great games or whatever, and Lord of the Rings always kind of floated to the top. It was always at the top. It was always, like, people were like, oh, Lord of the Rings is so great, and this and that. And I was like, oh, gee whiz. You know, like, I wonder what's so great about Lord of the Rings. And then I had a friend of mine who purchased one, and I was over to, you know, his way for a summer vacation one time, and I'm like, hey, I'm going to come over. He's like, all right, come over and play Lord of the Rings. And then I played it for 20 minutes. And then you saw the ring, and you said, wait a minute, wasn't that the time machine in Austin Powers?
    59:40
    So I played it, and I played it for 20 minutes, and I was a god. Yeah, pretty much most people are gods when they play this game. And I was like, oh, I get it now. Everybody feels amazing when they play this game, and that is the structure of this game. Because it is a fan layout. It's a fanny of fan layouts. It's got a couple of diverters, which are really cool, that sort of make the ball go in a different direction than you're expecting. And it's got a lot of toys and mechs in there. It has a Balrog. The Balrog that pops out in front. And we'll get into that in just a second because that caused some tension there. But does Keith Johnson think this is the greatest layout of all time? Well, Keith says, It wasn't the Lord of the Rings play field that I would have liked to have seen. I wanted you to be able to hit the black gates and have them open up and shoot into Mordor, that kind of thing. You can't argue with the success the game had. I personally have more fun shooting Simpsons than I do have shooting Lord. I'd want more ball-interactive devices. So Keith Johnson likes shooting the Simpsons more than shooting Lord of the Rings. Yes. But he is a much better player than I am, and he could probably hit that s***y side ramp. And it has possibly greatest call-outs ever. I mean, it's up there. Ooh, I mean, I don't know, man. Those Simpsons call-outs. John Rhys-Davies, and they got what's-his-face. Who was the other star? Because they got him, too. Elijah Wood. I do not know the way. Or whatever the hell he says. I don't know any of his quotes, but, I mean, they were done for the game. But all the... Jack Pops won!
    61:15
    He's so good. So good. John Rhys-Davies. God bless him. Didn't he pass away recently? I think you're thinking of Christopher Lee, because he's in the game, too. Yeah, that's right. His scenes from the movie are in there. The man with the golden gun. The man with the golden gun, yes. The Balrog. This hell is beyond any of you.
    61:34
    Run! Oh, wait a minute. I have to read more stuff now? You have to read more stuff, sir. I want a raise. Join us on Patreon to support the show. Our pro-crony level is the perfect way to say thanks, and it starts at $3 a month. Want to get early access to episodes before everyone else? Who doesn't have a strange love for stickers? That's kind of weird. Do you know what Discord is? I think I do. They're probably not. Interested in having your comments and questions take priority in our episodes? Jump on up to the $6 a month premium crony level. Really, you're going to call it crony. Want all the other perks and the shirt after three months? Join us at $20 a month and you can be an elite crony. Oh, my.
    62:22
    So good. It's a wonderful game. I really like this. I'm not going to get into too much fawning over this one, because I did that on The Simpsons already. But the fan layout on this, I think, keeps that ball flowing in a nice way. But the Balrog bash toy comes out all the time. So in the middle, there's this jump ramp with a spinner on it that goes into that magnetic ring that sort of makes the ball hover. And Balrog comes out to cover that up. And he's like this big, I don't know, fire demon with a whip of some sort. there was a lot of tension around this Balrog programming between Keith and Gary Stern. Well, let me guess. Gary wanted it to come out more. Gary wanted it to be out all the time, because if he was spending the money to put this in the game, he wanted it to be out all the time. And Keith didn't want it to be out all the time, because that ruined the flow of the game, and it was annoying. And Gary won, because Gary owns the company. The best thing, I think, about that story is, George Gomez, who did the play field, really didn't know anything about Lord of the Rings, and he had no idea what the thing was.
    63:28
    He just kind of like, you know, that monster thing that comes out. It's like, the bell rung! Say it, George! Say it right!
    63:36
    But, I mean, George, at this time, George Gomez, at this time, was just spending all of his time sort of on contract, doing a play field, and sending it in. Yeah, he was working for Midway at the time. And that was it, right? Like, everybody else did everything else. And George will tell you that this is Keith's baby. Keith is the one that made this game as great as it is. Another testament to how amazing Keith is and how great he is. He doesn't half-ass anything. He went all in on this one, too. Can you talk a little bit about the code? Yes, it's very deep. And it's another one that takes like 45 minutes to get to the end. So it's long, super mega long all times because it's really hard to lose because there's no real dangerous shots. They all kind of return to the flipper. We have the mini-wizard modes. We have, like, the destroy the ring. What's the other one? There and back again. Then the final wizard mode is Valinor. Valinor? Valinor, yeah. The Valinor multiball. So it's like there's all these different moving pieces to this. So one of them is every shot on the game has a character attached to it. And you shoot every shot in the game, and you collect the fellowship of the ring, and you get fellowship of the ring multiball. And then the next thing is you have to shoot the tower in the back a bunch of times, the falling tower, and then you start two towers multiball. And then there's like, on the playfield as well, there are all the different species. So there's like elves and man and dwarf. And you collect all of those on the shots, and then you start return of the king multiball. But then there's also the Gifts of the Elves, which is kind of on the left orbit, where it's like two times scoring and ring, multi-ball, and you get big points. It's like the gifts or the bonus or what do they call that?
    65:28
    The mystery awards? Oh, I don't know. I don't know half the things about this game because I just go for the multi-balls and play multi-balls. That's what I do. So the first time I played it, it was like I played three games. On the third game, I played for 30 minutes and almost destroyed the ring, which is the first wizard mode. And this is a person who hadn't been playing pinball for a long time. I felt like a god. A Canadian assassin. You never know when he hits you with a hockey stick. I remember watching an old documentary on pinball, and they were talking about how the 90s pins went too far with code and how things were too crazy. Well, this is something else now. They did get to the point where the ball times were very long. But they're making pins for home now, aren't they? No, not according to Gary Stern, they're not. So you're going to have somebody on location who just paid 75 cents or 50 cents. 50 cents back then, yeah. And be on this game for 40 minutes, yeah. You're not making any money on that. Well, in our Steve Ritchie episode, The Mullet Years, we talked about Elvis. This was an all-hands-on-deck game as well, where Keith sort of tried to finish everything up with everybody else. You can get more detail on Elvis in that Steve Ritchie episode, but I did find a wonderful Keith quote for this. Keith says, I think for the casual player there wasn't enough. It wasn't easy with what we had originally done to hear the different songs. He thought he made it too hard for the casuals, but not fun enough for the hardcores.
    66:59
    Keith's next big, big game was also another Steve Ritchie game called World Poker Tour. and we cover that one in the Steve Ritchie episode as well. But this is another example of some crazy, crazy deep code. After World Poker, anything you want to add with World Poker Tour?
    67:18
    Um, not really. I think I said everything I was going to say about it in the Steve Ritchie episode. Yeah, and I mean, we're not going to do it justice because we've got a bunch of other things to cover here because it requires a lot to go into. and that Steve Ritchie episode where we talk about World Poker Tour, that's where we do the deep, deep dive, and with code as amazing as Keith Johnson's code. You know, we can't just reiterate that over and over again. Go back and listen to that one in the archives. You can check those out at silverballchronicles.com in the archives, or in your podcatcher, you can go back through the Silver Ball Chronicles feed to listen to that Steve Ritchie episode. Mm-hmm.
    67:58
    Family Guy, we covered this one in the Pat Lawler episode. Hey, that's no favor to buy. This one was definitely a bit of a tug and pull and push when it came to Pat Lawler and Keith Johnson because there's a lot of silliness, not-so-family-friendly stuff, and that's not really up Pat Lawler's alley. No, he didn't really want to do this one. Now, one of the more controversial titles that Keith Johnson worked on was Wheel of Fortune. Now, why would that be controversial? Because it was a game based on murder. No, it's not. No, it isn't. Yeah, it's the game show theme from the TV show. Yeah, I remember when this came out, some of the complaints were the fact that no one in Europe, I guess, knows what Wheel of Fortune is. And that was a big market for Stern. Yeah, so they were just like, what is this? The same thing with NASCAR, that's why they made a Grand Prix for the European version, but I guess just Wheel of Fortune wasn't a thing over there. And it was never finished. It was never finished. We're still waiting on that wizard mode. Yeah, I guess there's an insert that never lights up. Oh, that's sad. Although I did hear there is a more complete version of it in existence. You just need to know the right people to get a hold of it. You've got to get in there. That's all I'll say. Well, the next game that Keith would work on at Stern was Indiana Jones. He would work on this with Lonnie Robb. This was designed by John Borg. Keith John... I'm sorry, Kevin O'Connor on art. Dots by Mark Galvez and Sound by the legend David Thiel. Now, this is based on the movie we don't talk about and all of the other ones that we actually love. It'll be one of the two ones we don't talk about in another couple of months. Yeah, that's right. So, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the fourth, sadly, Indiana Jones movie where he fights aliens. Yes, folk, aliens. No, the aliens, he doesn't fight them, and they don't come into the end of the movie. Spoilers he fighting Russians this time But it worse because it like there no Nazis and it after it got Shia LaBeouf and it was directed by Steven Spielberg So this next one that's coming up soon is not directed by Steven Spielberg, so you know it's probably going to be even worse. So it's so bad. But the thing is, this game was the ultimate grind of a pin. Now, that's very un-Keith Johnson-like. Yeah, this is definitely more of a Lonnie Roth game. This is definitely more of a Lonnie Roth game. And it's a shoot this shot this many times kind of game. It's just grind, grind, grind, grind. To be fair, to be fair, I will say I saw this game once in a, it was in an environment where we had a lot of non-pinball players there. And this was the one they played the most by far. Really? They loved seeing the arc thing open. They liked all the movie clips. They totally loved this game. Now we're going to get into another John Borg episode here sometime this year. And we'll really get into the bro of flow and how he's able to make his games flow really well. Did you just say the bro of flow? That's what John Borg's nickname is, the bro of flow.
    71:21
    He drives a BMX bike. He smokes. He plays guitar. He's really good at singing Rush. He's the bro of flow, my friend. It's a great little fan layout, but it's just grindy. And the art is not inspired. It's so terrible. For people who didn't like Jurassic Park with the map, you don't know what a bad map looks like. Look at this thing. It's terrible. It is not good. It's well worth your time to look it up. It's well worth your time to play it. It is fun. It is fun to shoot. The Ark toy is really cool. It's got a scoop because John Borg just goes ape shit for scoops. Oh, swearing. Oh, it's got a magnet. It's got a magnet in front of the Ark because he loves to put magnets in front of Bash toys. Yep, and later we'd repurpose this Ark and make it the toy box for Aerosmith. Oh, yeah. I don't think it's an exact copy, but I'm sure there are similar elements on how the mech works because I think there's a little platform thing that right raises up and all the balls just fall out. just like they do on Aerosmith. It's a great little game. We'll cover this in more detail during that episode coming up in the future. But CSI was the last game that Keith would work on, and this, of course, was an all-hands-on-deck Pat Lawler, where Pat Lawler left halfway through it and everybody was canned. And Lyman finished it up with Lonnie. But Keith was let go. Yeah, and this is the one that I think it is the three main multi-balls, and each was done by a different... One was done by Lonnie Ropp, another one was done by Lyman Sheets, and another one was done by Keith Johnson. Yeah, it was... Can you guess which guy did which one? Yeah, I'm assuming the really long one where you have to lock balls is Keith.
    73:06
    So the 2008 downturn, we've touched on this a few times, and almost, you know, the death of Stern, and this is something we'll bring up in our Pinball is Dying series in much more detail, but Keith was laid off during the 2008 downturn in October of 2008. It was around this time that Keith recorded the TopCast episode, where most of the quotes came from our episode. And he was fresh off leaving Stern, and he didn't pull any punches. Now, he wasn't overly mean or anything, but the best thing, I think, about Keith Johnson is that he's a straight shooter. He doesn't play politics. He doesn't goof around. He will tell you exactly what he's thinking at exactly that time, and I commend him for that. But you can tell he was definitely hurt by being laid off in 2008. Keith would say, I would say slightly over 50% of the overhead staff was cut, and then the people that remained took an additional pay cut. I took, I think, a 10% pay cut in August, like pretty much everyone that worked there. Yeah, it was very clear that there were some struggles happening in manufacturing. Over the summer at Stern, especially in this time, sales did drop off in the summer because everybody is out and about. They're not in the bar playing pinball and, you know, they're not staying at home playing pinball. They're out and about. Now, in the fall, winter, and spring, that's the different story. So they tend to sell more pins at that time. So people, you know, taking time off or having a pay cut in the summer months is not unusual, except it was particularly big around this time. But this is again where Gary Stern did some interviews, and he was actually complaining about various things. One of those things was ball times. Oh, yeah. Keith Code was specifically focused on games that happened to have long ball times. If you're out there and you're trying to sell pins outside of the home to collect money and generate money, Keith Code games are probably not the ones that you want to have on location, right? They play really long. They're really complicated. You know, we just tried to explain The Simpsons and Lord of the Rings. I own The Simpsons. I can't even remember how to play the code. So, if playing too long on pinball machines is not going to generate money. So, if you're going to let somebody go in your programming department, it's probably the guy who makes the games that play too long. We're also moving into the home market versus operators, right? Right. So, why would it matter then how long the code is? Then you want longer playing games for code, don't you? but people weren't necessarily playing pinball today like they were in the 90s, and it was very apparent for that for all of the designers and programmers. And this wasn't lost on Keith. He wasn't ignorant to that. He understood, but pinball was not the same anymore. Well, Keith said, pinballs don't earn. I don't think it's because good players play on them too long. I think it's general lack of appeal. Yeah, so, I mean, not pulling any punches. He's basically saying, hey, it's not my code that's turning people off because it plays too long. It's the fact that nobody's playing pinball. And I probably partly agree with that. After the 2008 mass firings and the 2009 Expo, I remember Gary talking about how we've got to get the games playing shorter. Yeah, that's where we're getting into Tron. We're getting into Iron Man. Not even Tron yet. Yeah, Iron Man. You've got the NBA. Big Buck Hunter. Yeah, let's get some coins back in these things for the operators, right? So there's a significant philosophy change at around 2008. Now, there's moves being made in the industry around this time. And Keith would say that he's personally not very optimistic about the long-term health of Stern. This is in 2008. I personally am not very optimistic about the long-term health of Stern. When we got the 10% pay cuts in August, I pretty much made up my mind that I was going to have to leave. And I already started putting my resume out there. I had already come to the conclusion that I was not going to be able to continue at Stern myself. Yeah, so when he received that pay cut, he started to make some moves. That's when the mass layoffs happened at Stern. In October 2008, right after Expo. Keith would say, I fully expected layoffs to occur. Some people did not expect the amount of complete carnage that occurred last Wednesday. because he's recording this with TopCast like a week after it occurred. So the wounds are still quite, I think, open and sore. Yeah, listen to the Steve Ritchie TopCast interview. They were very open and sore. Yeah, everybody at that time were pretty upset. Now, was Keith bitter that he was let go? No, I don't think he was bitter. I mean, when you're let go from a job that you really kind of love and enjoy and you've been putting your heart into and making two of probably the greatest coded games ever to be coded to this point, you've got to be kind of upset. I wouldn't say bitter. I would just say upset or annoyed. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't mad at Stern necessarily. And he said, I mean, that changed later on because Keith would say later on that maybe a year or so after that, when Stern, like, didn't die and kind of started some kind of, you know, recovery, that they expressed interest in hiring him back, and then they just stopped talking to him. They ghosted him. That's what the kids say nowadays. He was not happy with that. Yeah. The other really, there's a couple of other really amazing interviews to listen to. One of them is Head to Head Pinball, episode number four, with Martin Robbins and Ryan See. They did a great interview.
    78:52
    I'm sorry, yeah, 41, where they did a really great interview with Keith around the time that Jersey Jack Pirates of the Caribbean was launched. That's well worth your checkout, as well as there is a pinball profile with Jeff Teolis right around the COVID lockdowns of 2020 when Keith was working on the GNR code, which he didn't talk about. He kept that very quiet, but he spoke about sort of his other bits of the background and time at JJP. Well, Keith would end up at a company called Play Mechanics, which was an arcade machine developer. He took the job because, well, he needed a job, and he wasn't really excited to work there, but it was gaming, I guess, and arcades, I guess. It's not like he was sad to work there. He just wasn't as enthusiastic as he could have been. And Keith says, I actually talked to Stern in the summer of 2010. I went over there and interviewed, met Dave Peterson and all that stuff. I was talking with them to go back because Lyman left. That thing obviously fell through, and that's what I was talking about from before, yeah. Right, so then, you know, here's the thing, right? Is it that Dave Peterson and George Gomez, and they all met with him and they're like, you know what, he doesn't fit here. Maybe that's why he didn't come aboard.
    80:07
    You know, maybe they just didn't have a spot for him. Maybe it's because Lyman actually came back in 2010, if you recall, right? He was only gone for a few months.
    80:17
    Yeah, he came back in 2011, right around the Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah, so I mean, there was some other, I don't think it was that, you know, maybe Keith felt hurt that he wasn't brought aboard, that he was sort of maybe led down that area, which is why he's a little bit, you know, disenfranchised with the leadership there. Maybe we're speculating and, you know what, it's not actually that bad at all. But that's a lot less fun. And then Keith states, I remember posting an RGP that, you know, if someone's going to make you go with this, it's going to be Jack, meaning Jersey Jack. and you know he's probably the only person that can make this successful. Keith was talking about the announcement from January of 2011 where Jersey Jack would talk about starting his own pinball machine manufacturer and the Wizard of Oz intellectual property for their first pinball machine. Well, Keith would say that Jack eventually would come knocking, and the risk-reward of going to Jersey Jack for staying at Play Mechanics was essentially infinite, and it was better to go back to pinball.
    81:28
    But Keith was an integral part of the Jersey Jack team. He actually showed up in Chicago to do some of this work with them. The play field done by Joe Balzer still wasn't quite finished yet, but there was still so much that had to be done at Jersey Jack. They actually had to build an operating system and an entire framework. That had to be created before they even thought about programming lights and switches. Which is a ton of, I mean, you look at a lot of the up-and-coming companies or companies that came out the last few years, like American Pinball uses, I think, the P-Rock system.
    82:08
    A lot of them use pre-existing systems. Yeah, they go with like an off-the-shelf sort of system. Yeah, like P-Rock, Fast, I guess is another one. but they just did everything from the ground up. Yeah, well, at this time, they didn't really have any of these third parties. He literally had to program a one-to-four-player game. How many balls are in play? Tracking the ball. What happens when the ball drains? Putting the ball into the shooter lane. Switching to the next player after it drains. Writing the audit system and adjustments. He had to do all of that work. And Keith says, it's all kinds of work that has to be done to make a pinball system. It's not glamorous and not fun. The cool part is when you get to do multi-balls and play the game and flip it and have exciting. It's not trying to figure out the bugs of the shooter lane or the ball search. You know what I mean? Like, ugh, that would be terrible. That doesn't come without its own stress, that's for sure. And Keith had dealt with a lot of stress in this period of time. Yeah, Keith said, I was maintaining two sets of code. One was the show code, the dog and pony code, and the other code was the code that was the real game code. It was hair pulling for a long time. Plus, my wife and I were in the process of adopting our child. There were all kinds of things going on, and it was just like, I don't need all this going on right now, but here I am. Keith was dealing with a lot at this time. He's building from the ground up. He's back in pinball. He's excited to be there. He's adopting a child. He's working crazy hours, and he's doing all of this for what reason? He's doing all of this for you and I, Ron, to make us happy with pinball machines. That really goes, I think, to the crux of why all of the designers and all of the coders, all of the artists, they do what they do because they want us to have fun, even though it is incredibly stressful for them. So, I mean, hats off. But the game that he was talking about there, that he was working on, having the show code, which is the code that they would bring to a show with the blinking lights and stuff, and then the actual code of the gameplay, that was for Wizard of Oz, the licensed movie theme from April of 2013. There's an unknown number of units sold. It is the JJP board set. It's designed by the King of Clunk, Joe Balser. Art by Jerry Vanderstelt, Greg Freres, and Matt Rez... Cluster. Click. Click, click, click.
    84:45
    Animation by John Paul DeWin. Sound and music by Chris Granner and Rob Berry. Software by Keith Johnson, Ted Essies, Joe Katz, and J.T. Harkley. And Alex Levy. You forgot him. Oh, and Alex Levy. Forget Alex. Oh, my God. Poor Alex. My goodness, Alex Levy. This is based on the Wizard of Oz theme, which is the old school movie. Yes, the 1939 MGM classic. Oh, my goodness. One of the highest grossing films of all time, right? This is right up there with Avatar. Oh, I don't know if it's up there.
    85:24
    Avatar and Endgame. But it was on TV like every year. Yeah. I mean, this is the very famous Judy Garland movie. It had a budget of $2.8 million, and it had a box office of $30 million, way back in the 30s. It's the musical with the lion and the tin man and the man behind the curtain and the Toto the dog and the slippers and all that stuff. It's great. Great film, but what an odd thing to have a pinball machine around, isn't it? Not at all. You don't think so? It's a family-friendly theme that everybody knows. Everybody knows Wizard of Oz. And Wizard of Oz was one heck of a seller, and probably could still be one heck of a seller for Jersey Jack. They ran this about a billion times. And different versions, each more expensive than the next version. This game was so huge and so ambitious and so excitingly different that it almost bankrupt the entire company. Yeah, because they probably underpriced it. As crazy as that seems, the price of this was $6,500. This was when Stern was selling games for under $4,000. You could get it for under $4,000. And this was the premium homeowner bring-back-the-Bally-Williams magic excitement. This was the bring-back-mechs. Bring it back. And boy, oh boy, did they go all in. They went all in. It's a wide body, so we can put more stuff in it. Because everybody loves wide body. You fit more crap in it. Two upper plate fields because only one is just, you need more than one. Physical sculpts. So we're not talking flat plastics. We're not talking, like, pictures.
    87:15
    Actual molded toys everywhere. Yep. I said my favorite thing in the game is the pop bumpers. The trees. Yeah, the creepy trees with the faces. Well, how would you like it if someone picked apples off of you? I would be pretty upset. And they're holding apples in their hands, if you look. So it's got the witch's castle at the top, the top playfield, upper playfield. It's got the Wicked Witch of the West toy, which goes up and down. It's got these bumpers with the trees on it. It has a crystal ball, which has like a screen underneath it, so when you look into the crystal ball, you see clips. It's pretty brilliant. Monkeys. Hold on, we're getting there. Oh. It's got the balloon pop bumper state fair out lane toy thing. Which I believe was a Dennis Nordman thing. It's got ruby red flippers.
    88:09
    So the covers on the flippers, they're little ruby red shoes. That always fall off. It's got the Toto rollover out lane on the other side, which is like another ball save escape thing. Way easier than the one on the left. It's way easier. It has the upper playfield, which is the spinning house. So you shoot around this little mini loop in the upper playfield, and the house will actually spin. It has the winged monkey mech in the back, where the monkey comes down with a magnet, picks up the ball, and hides it and locks it behind in the witch's castle, which is part of the movie.
    88:48
    And it has RGB lighting everywhere. Full RGB lighting, yes. and a 24-inch LCD back box monitor, which was something out of science fiction at this time, because we are still stuck at DMDs. We are still stuck at dot matrix displays everywhere else. Yep. This was a revolutionary pin, and Keith Johnson was one of the fellows that worked tirelessly and endlessly to actually get this thing to work, which was crazy. And this was the game that Stern looked at and said, wow, people paid $6,500 for that? People paid $6,500 for that? I think we need to be charging more for our games.
    89:36
    And that's where it all went wrong for us. It was something else. Like, this is a great little game. Now, it was originally, this is a pet peeve of mine, okay? how games are named and editions and limited and not limited and collectors and all this thing. But let's talk about the first one here, which is the standard edition. Now, this included the 26-inch LCD screen in Visiglass, which is polarized glass that doesn't reflect light. It had a shaker motor. It had all the RGB LEDs. It had a seven-speaker 2.1 audio system. It had full-color printed manual, and it had super shiny armor and legs. Super shiny. Then, they came out with the Emerald City Limited Edition. This is the super fancy, expensive one. To be fair, I think the first two were at launch.
    90:38
    Yes. You could get the standard, or the limited edition. That's right. The limited edition model had a thousand units.
    90:46
    It had green armor and legs. It had a numbered plaque on the arch down by the flippers or the apron, some people call it. It had the signed the wooden arch was signed. Looks good. It does look good. Heavy as heck, but it looks good. It has an Emerald City topper and it had an audio connection for headphones. And it also had, at least at the beginning of the run, the clear-coated silk screen cabinet. Which is basically like the butter cabs that Spooky does. Beautiful pin. Now, I played a bit of Wizard of Oz at Pintastic last year, and I was greatly unimpressed with the gameplay. Aww. I really was. Like, everybody's like, oh, my God, Wizard of Oz is so great. And I played it, and I'm like, this shoot's terrible. Is that just the Joe Balser thing? or do people like that? It's very deep. I know, but it's no fun to get there. It's very deep. It's very diplomatic of you. Your answer is very telling.
    91:57
    Everybody can hear through that, Ron. I didn't stop you. Let's put it that way. So after they sold all 1,000 of those Emerald City editions... Yeah, and this was a bone of contention, too, because they're selling these LE editions. There's only 1,000 of these. Oh, I've got to have it. Got to have it. So they sell them all. And then like a year or two later, okay, we're now going to do the 75th anniversary edition. The 75th anniversary edition. Which is the ruby red edition. So the trim's all going to be red. Right. So it's 1,500 units. It's all super shiny red armor legs, armor and legs. It has the connection to the audio. It has the 75th anniversary edition topper, and the back glass was different. and it had a different numbered arch and plaque. I think this is probably the nicer unit, in my opinion. But wait a second. You can't have a second limited edition, can you? Sure you can. You could even have a third one. Well, I mean, I guess, so this is where we get into this limited edition thing. Okay, I get it.
    93:03
    Stern's limited edition is like 500 or 1,000 units, and that's it. But sometimes they come up with another one. Yep. But Jersey Jack did that, and people freaked out. Because you're only supposed to have so many units. It's like, well, no, there's only 1,000 units of that type of limited edition. So I get it. I'm actually okay with it. I think it's annoying, and it makes your branding and marketing look weird and confusing. But I understand it. Now, there's 1,500 of these 75th anniversary editions. So they're selling even more of those. and then in 2019 they unveiled the Yellow Brick Road Limited Edition which is the ugliest of them because it is bright yellow I remember that was right at Texas Pinball Festival and this had one of the greatest reveals of all time where in the room at the Texas Pinball Festival everybody was expecting the next greatest pin from Jersey Jack and when they came into that seminar room, there was a pinball machine covered in garbage bags.
    94:11
    And under those garbage bags, the yellow sparkled play field, the no-winged monkey, Yeah, the monkey's not in this one. the updated witch's castle mechanics, which had less stuff to break. It had a special back glass. It had radcals on the side, which are like plastic, shiny, covered art things. it had a new topper it had yellow powder coated ramps and legs it had a return of the wooden arch and the new back box design which was actually taken from Dialed In yeah train wreck of the launch of this aside it sold quite well these limited edition yellow brick roads but at that time the price had gone way up every single time they released a new one but they kept selling them which is why I ask again Why is it selling if it's not that great to shoot? It's got a ton of toys. It looks impressive, but it's not that impressive. They love that deep code. So this code is a bit unusual, right? There's horses of a color, and there's areas to shoot, and there's wizard modes, and, like, it's really got a lot going on. And the only person I think that can really explain this is Martin Robbins from the Final Round podcast. Like, do you understand any of that game? I'm trying to remember, what is the final mode? I think it's somewhere over the rainbow, right? Yes. All I know is that, but I don't know how to get there. I don't know what to shoot. I don't know where to go. You've got to do everything. Everything. You've got to do everything. You just shoot the ball everywhere, and eventually stuff will happen, and that's not that fun. I mean, I understand that if you're paying a lot of money for a pin, you want to do a lot of stuff. I like the monkey.
    95:55
    The monkey's cool. I mean, I get it. It's just, this pin obviously was a, let's throw everything in there, let Keith do whatever he wants with code, and we'll see how it goes. And it went okay, and it sold really well. It went good. It went more than okay. You know what I mean? But there was a big controversy when it came to the light boards. Do you remember that? Oh, they had issues. The first run games had, they had issues with the light boards. Which are the boards underneath the play field that blink lights. It's kind of like the node boards, basically. The light boards. The ones that, yeah, have the lights.
    96:31
    Ha-ha, yes, there. Very, very good. Very good. But a lot of them failed. Yeah. And Jersey Jack had to send out a bunch of new ones for a bunch of people under warranty. And Jersey Jack got into some serious troubles when it came to finance. And there was ownership changes where they ended up coming into the billionaire family of the Abbasists. I think that was after The Hobbit, though. Or at least during The Hobbit. But, yeah. But there was a lot of things. The light boards, I remember, yeah. They had to do a design change.
    97:00
    And honestly, when you're coming up with a completely new board set, a completely just new framework, if whiteboards being replaced is the worst thing that happens,
    97:13
    I mean, I know it costs them a lot of money, but it's better than something going horribly wrong and games like frying themselves or setting, you know, catching fire. Setting houses on fire. Yeah. So, yeah, and if yours went, you got new light boards.
    97:28
    Most people, if you talk to them about all the different editions, you'd like to have the Emerald Edition with the super glossy cabinet, silk screen, with the new light boards. That would be like the perfect version. You have the best of everything there. I would love to put a lot more time on it. Like, you know, I probably played a dozen solid games, and it was cool. Like, I'm not going to lie. It was one in our league. At the bar, they had a Emerald City LE. Not kidding. Wow. Yeah, the wood, the apron, all that. It had the silk screen, clear-coated cabinet art, everything. This isn't your Stern Iron Man or Tron. No. That's what was being released at this time was like Tron, right? Right. You got ACDC is coming out right after this. ACDC beat it, though, with the RGB lighting. And it's still not as impressive. But I would love to put more time on it. I'd like to play more. I'd like to see what the hype is about. Because people must, it must be, but my God, they're heavy. Oh, they're very heavy. They have the heaviest games. Yep. Holy moly. You want to talk about heavy, let's talk about their next pin. Oh, yeah. The next pin that Keith worked on, The Hobbit. This is the movie license theme from April of 2016. We don't know how many units they sold. This is designed by the King of Clunk, Joe Balser. Art by Jean-Paul DeWin. Animation by Jean-Paul DeWin. Sound and music by David Thiel. Software, Keith Johnson, Ted Essie, Joe Katz, and J.T. Harkley.
    99:06
    Now, this, this had a whole crazy development cycle, right? This was something where they were, like, struggling to get this game out. Isn't that right? I remember going to the factory when they were starting to build the Wizard of Oz's, but they had already picked the next theme. Like, you already knew it was Hobbit. It wasn't a mystery. They came out and said, our next game is going to be Hobbit.
    99:34
    And they had a thing. Yeah, after the factory tour and all that, they were all going to go to watch one of the Hobbit movies that was just released.
    99:44
    So it was interesting that you knew what the game was going to be before it was even. Now they hide everything. Yeah, so they played this card that Peter Jackson, who did the original Lord of the Rings, was releasing a new motion picture trilogy around the Hobbit movie, which makes no sense because the Hobbit is one book and Lord of the Rings is three books. This had a huge, huge expectation because the Lord of the Rings trilogy is objectively one of the greatest sort of film epics of all time based on some of the greatest book epics of all time. And Peter Jackson went all out. They spent almost $750 million, and it had almost a $3 billion box office across three films. But these films were not widely accepted and were not hailed and praised as much as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In fact, they scored 67% Rotten Tomatoes for the first Hobbit movie. The second Hobbit movie scored 74% Rotten Tomatoes. And the third movie, which was pretty much a useless three-hour movie, was 60% or 59%. and that's a far cry from the 90s that the Lord of the Rings movies get. So it's a bit of a gamble to go with some movies you haven't seen yet, but that's what they did. But the other issue with this was that they released the art, and everybody freaked out at how ugly the art was for this pin, so then they redid the entire art again, right? Yeah, it was there. Yeah, they unveiled it. But again, it's when they used to unveil the games when they were still a work in progress. They weren't even ready yet. They kind of stopped doing that later on. Which is like a big no-no. They unveiled the game, and everyone saw the art, and everyone hated it. They hated the art. So then they redid the art. Hey, Pinheads. When I'm not doing this podcast, I'm Dave the Financial Advice Guy. In a recent survey, we found that 70% of those polled were concerned about their retirement strategy. Canadians have a number of concerns when looking out over the next 15 years. Professional financial advice is key to helping you through a variety of challenges, ranging from inflation, market volatility, and determining how to maximize your retirement income in the safest, most effective, and tax-efficient way. Today's economy requires an experienced hand and a personalized plan. Don't take my word for it. Just listen to Nordman. I am the Nordman, and I approve of Dennis Financial's investment and insurance advice. Their opinions on vacuum form grants are great, too. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book. Or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance Solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc. Canadian residents only.
    103:03
    To be honest, I remember seeing a play field with the old art. I didn't think it was that bad. It was like more grey and with the... But I mean, the new one is better. Sometimes you can listen to the customers too much, I think. Well, that's inevitably it, right? And when you're a small company and you're sort of being run by a sales guy, yes man, like Jersey Jack, and I say that, I don't mean to be mean about that, but that's just what sales people are. We try to please everybody and we want everybody to like us. I'm a salesperson, too. I get that they would pivot and change on that, but it's not necessarily the best thing to do. In this, you know, it probably was. But it created more delays and more issues and more cost overruns. And then eventually that's where you would end up with Hobbit being sold. Now, a lot of people were a little bit disappointed in the Hobbit's code because they expected something different. Isn't that right? Well, Keith says, Hobbit is kind of a sore point because we put a lot of crap into that game, and it wasn't what people wanted. They were expecting Lord of the Rings 2, but I don't want to do the exact same game every time. If you want Lord of the Rings 2, you should be playing Wizard of Oz. So, I mean, that Wizard of Oz, and Keith has said this quite a few times, that code is more similar to Lord of the Rings than the Hobbit code was. In my opinion, I think it's the play field that is the part of the Hobbit that holds it back. So let's talk about what is on this play field. There are three flippers. There are three pop bumpers. Okay, this is pretty regular stuff. There's four pop-up targets, which are like the trolls in Medieval Madness. I think it's like the same mech. But there's not just two. There's four. Yeah, that's another reason the game's so heavy. Jersey Jack doesn't do one thing. It's like, let's do the same thing, but, like, on steroids. There's two spinners. There's 11 stand-up targets. There's two vertical up-kickers. Two three-bank drop targets. There one captive ball one Newton ball post There a five drop target controllable Individually controllable This is insane One mini LCD book screen under the glass. The large smog toy, which is the dragon. Smog. On the, on the, on the, that rotates. There's a player control diverter in the back ramp. And there's a physical out lane kickback. This thing is so heavy. So big. And they got tons of assets. They have all the clip from the actual movie. Unbelievable. The multiball, what they did when they had it at Expo, with the art that everyone hated, the one thing they had coded in there was the multiball intro. So you got to see the dragons talking to you. And the multiball starts like, oh, okay, that's cool. He turns his head and looks at you like, whoa. I want to play this game so bad. I haven't played this game I want to play it so bad because I want to make up my opinion for myself because I think I really want it. I really want to like it. I really think it's very cool. I like pins that are theme-y and atmospheric and integrated really well. And this is probably, they say, like one of the greatest integrated pins of all time. The downside to it, unfortunately, is the play field. So it's a fan layout. The shots are left to right. It's not bad. It has a third flipper. But some people would say that third flipper could be removed and it wouldn't make any difference. There was originally a fourth flipper in there, but it was removed because it was only there to be a flipper and literally didn't shoot anything on the right side of the playfield. But the left one on the left side shoots the drop targets on the left. Sorry, the flipper on the right shoots the drop targets on the left. But you could shoot those from the bottom flipper, so there's no sense of having that there. There's no side ramps to shoot that in. There's no, like it is a completely useless flipper. It really is. It's like a mechanic to have in the game to have in the game for no other reason. The other thing is that it has these ramps that are sort of like the boat ramps from Fishtails, but it's a way back in the back of the play field, and it has two vertical up kickers on the left and right side that you sort of shoot it in, and it goes, and then it goes plop up onto the ramp. Have you played this? then you can't say all these things. What do you think? You tell me. You've played it.
    107:33
    It's not stellar. I mean, it's not like, oh, my God, this thing shoots like a dream. It doesn't. But it's better than Wizard of Oz. I kind of liked it better just because it's cool starting a multiball with the freaking dragon there. Even though I'd never seen any of the movies, they play on the screen and it looks cool and the light show is cool. and they had assets galore in this game. I've heard from multiple people that when casuals come up to play,
    108:06
    they just don't have any clue what's going on or where to shoot or what to do. There's no bash toy. There's no real sort of ramps in your face. There's no magnets in places. There's those pop-up trolls and spiders and animals and wolves and whatever that pop up out of the play field, But to get those to pop up, you've got to get it into the in lanes. Casuals have a really hard time with this pin. I'm not really a casual. I don't know any casuals at this point.
    108:35
    But I've heard that a few times. When people stand up, they're like, if you and I got here, we'd be like, okay, I'm going to shoot the thing and start the mode, and then the mode is telling me to shoot the drop targets or shoot the orbits or collect the characters or whatever. But you've got to collect the shots, and then the shots, You collect all the characters, and then you roll over the locks, and then you shoot the animals. There are multi-balls on here where Keith throws everything at you. Like, you're a multi-ball. You're hitting shots. Trolls are popping off. You're hitting trolls. Everything's lit. The sounds are going insane. It's just, yeah. So then, like I said before, if you're doing everything, nothing means anything. Is that correct?
    109:15
    You know what I mean? Like, if everything is a jackpot and everything is lit and whatever you're doing is doing something, then it all kind of blurs together and is kind of meaningless. Not if you're a casual. It's great. Yeah, maybe.
    109:28
    But do they have any clue what's up? It's just blinking and stuff. When I look at the first half of Keith's sort of creation of pinball code, we got, like, The Simpsons and Lord of the Rings and World Poker Tour and stuff like that. And you can obviously tell that there's somebody at Stern who's always looking over his shoulder and saying, like, don't do that. Or I want Balrog to come out more. Or we need a bash toy. Or this has to come there. If I'm paying for Balrog, he better be out more often. And they kind of rein him in or bother him enough and make Keith angry enough that he does some of the things that they want. And it's like he's been corralled into creating the games that he's created. Now it looks at Jersey Jack like nobody tells him no. He's the leader of the coding team that he's in front of, and he is literally doing everything that he wants, and I think it might be too much. The David Dennis narrative. What do you think? I'm not saying it's good or bad, because like I said, I haven't played enough of it to make my full code. I'm just saying there's a lot going on here, and there is a lot of craziness, and a lot of people say, man, it's too much. I should argue, though, this is 100% for the home market. Okay, so we're in a different market. This has to keep people occupied for years. So this isn't Dave swinging up at Pentastic playing four games or somebody throwing in a dollar and playing two games, right? This is a totally different thing. So maybe we'll talk about that a little bit here on the next game, but I really, really, really want to play this game because I really want to make up an opinion because I think it looks fun, fantastic, and it's my kind of game, but I just think, wow, there's a whole lot of thing going on here. So let's get into the additions of this game. So this got into a really weird, confusing additions too, didn't it? I think it had a couple LE versions, but... So it had the standard edition, okay? So there was a standard edition for this game where it had all the movie scenes. It had some of standard stainless steel parts. We haven't gotten to the era of Jersey Jack where they actually take anything out of the game. So the base game is the same no matter what version you have. It's the more expensive versions have way more bling, basically, is the only difference. So it's got standard stainless steel. It's got a regular industry coin door. It's got three pop bumpers that are just standard pop bumpers. You know, it has no shaker motor, but it's exactly the same when it comes to physical gameplay. Now, the limited edition is where things get a bit different. So these were on the pre-production promo, and you can see this on IPDB, which is the Internet Pinball Database, where you can look up these games. And in here, we get the Seabreeze Bronze Powder-Coated Armor and Body Legs, which is actually very nice. It has the coin door with the external headphone jack and volume control. It has the Invisiglass, the shaker motor. It has a numbered certificate of authenticity. Plus, it just looks awesome. And it has these really cool axe slingshots. So the slingshots have like little axes that stick up. So it pushes the rubber, which pushes the ball. But then above that, these little axes kind of come down. It looks awesome. Super cool. But then there was the Smaug Gold Limited Edition. And this added a gold-colored Smaug toy, so he was colored, painted differently, and gold armor and body legs. And then later on there was another version. There was the Black Arrow Special Edition. So it wasn't a limited edition. It was a special edition. So now we're getting into the mess of things here, right? Like, my God, marketing. Gold-colored Smaug. So there was no, the gold Smaug edition was useless because now you got it on the Black Arrow one. It had black ink body armor and legs, which I thought was very pretty. And it has the headphone jack, the volume controls. It has the Black Arrow limited edition mode animations, which basically meant the attract mode had, like it said, you know, Black Arrow edition, which actually looked really cool. Jean-Paul DeWin, man, you kill it. You are so good at this stuff. Black flipper bats, black captive ball. People who play this game say it's absolutely amazing. Other people play it and they're like, I just don't get it. And I don't know where I'm going to fit in that spectrum.
    114:08
    What is your co-host on Slam Tilt Podcast, your other podcast, Bruce Nightingale? What does he think of The Hobbit? I don't know if he likes those games. I know he hates all the ones I like. Like, he hates Dial In. He hates Wonka. So I don't know what he thinks of Hobbit. Okay, so let's jump into Pirates of the Caribbean. the licensed movie theme that is from the Disney property that is named after the ride at the Disney theme parks this is from September of 2008 so this game was the one along with Deadpool that was coming out right kind of after I had joined Pinball so I was kind of excited to see this from the manufacturer Jersey Jack it was designed by Eric Mignier or Mignier as it's supposed to be and he doesn't know how to say his name. Animations by Jean-Paul DeWin. Sound by David Thiel. And software by Keith P. Johnson, Joe Katz, Ted Estes, and J.T. Harkery. This is a pretty cool game. I'm not going to lie. It's pretty exciting.
    115:19
    This game has a very interesting history. Jersey Jack went after this IP, he said in previous interviews. He went after Pirates of the Caribbean because the original Pirates of the Caribbean from Stern, when he was a Stern distributor, sold a lot. So he's like, that is an awesome theme. I want to go back into that theme, which I think is a crazy way to run a business, which is why Jersey Jack doesn't run it anymore. It was a good Disney theme. Everyone likes Pirates of the Caribbean, at least the original three. Now, when they negotiated the contract for this, they did not get a whole lot of or any video assets. No. So you're basically playing a pirate game with photos from Pirates of the Caribbean.
    116:04
    And one of the actors. Yes. Now, the actor is the fellow that does all the call-outs, does an amazing job. And the sound package by David Thiel is stunning. And the visuals by Jean-Paul DeWin, stunning. The play field, pretty good. I like the play field. It's not the greatest of play fields. It's a wide body, and there's more shots in the middle that are kind of fun, and the ones on the outside are absolutely just terrible. Wow, that's a strong taste by David Dennis. You're going to get so much hate mail. I'm probably going to get a lot of hate mail. If I ever see Eric Minner, he's probably going to punch me in the face. But it's a really, it's an ambitious game. It's an exciting game, but it ended up being hamstrung in quite a different way. So on the right side, you've got just this super cool rocking ship, upper playfield. So the playfield is literally a ship that rocks back and forth, and there's a ramp that you shoot up to it, which is a terrible ramp. It just is terrible. But you get up there, and it is so cool. And then you can lock a ball on the left side of that ship, and it shoots across, like literally your ball shoots across into another sculpt on the other side. Like, that is pretty stunning. Then there's a chest locking mechanism in the middle of the playfield. So you've actually played this one? I've played this a lot, actually, yeah. I've played this a lot, oddly enough. Then underneath there's this really cool sort of magnet spot underneath the ship where you're, like, stuck in the whirlpool of the ship. There's the maelstrom ramp on the other side where it will go through the ramp or it will divert it down into almost like a toilet bowl thing going around. It's a great game. It is a really great game. It's just for some reason it doesn't come together. Now, a lot of the controversy around this game was that things were either costed out or taken out because they weren't working quite the way they wanted to. I think that's overblown. I think people put too much anger in that. I don't think that that's a big deal. What happened was they unveiled this at Expo. and by unveil I mean show an early prototype of it because it wasn't ready yet. And they showed it had a triple spinning disc in the center. It spun three different ways. There's three different parts of the disc that spin. And it had the chest in the back open and closed, kind of like the chest in the stern one.
    118:40
    And it just took so long. It was, I don't know, eight to ten months after that before this was finally released, and they just could not get the triple spinning disc working right, so they pulled it. There were some kind of issue with the trunk opening and closing, so they pulled that. So it doesn't open and close anymore. It just stays closed. I know that some distributors, they had early copies of the game with the triple spinning disc, and they had them for like a year, and they would bring them to shows. So it would be like the same game. So you would see this triple spinning disc, but then when the production game came out, it didn't have it. Plus, I know at least a few of them, they had issues with the upper play field, where it would only rock in one direction. It would not rock back and forth. Yeah, because the cables were too tight underneath. It would pull the cables out and break the cables. It's the same games. I played the same prototypes, multiple shows. And then when it finally came out in production, it might even have been a year or over a year after the initial unveiling, and it all kind of died down, and it really hurt the game, I think. Yeah, the initial sales fell off a cliff. I mean, more than the whole, like, cutting stuff, I think it's the amount of time between when they showed it and the buzz was there to when it finally came out in production. It took so long. I played this at Sunshine Laundromat when I was in Manhattan, or when I was in Brooklyn. I played it, and I'm like, hey, this is kind of fun, and the code is really kind of neat and innovative and whatever, but I played it quite a bit during that vacation when I was there. I was back a few times. And the shots, you ended up just being in the middle of the play field a lot, and the ramps were really, like, they just didn't, they weren't great. I don't know what it was. You know, people talk about Jersey Jack flippers are different, or maybe the power needed to be turned up or something, but, like, my experience was not really all that great. But I did spend a lot of time watching Kevin from Buffalo Pinball on his stream playing the game, and I'm telling you, man, and it looked like so much fun. But holy crap, there was a lot going on. It has a repeatable loop shot. I love that. That gets my attention. Then we get into the whole issue of the code. So the code is that you can choose up to like 20 different characters. Yes. From the game. And each one of those, so you put your coin in, you push start, and you get like 20 characters to pick from, and they all have different perks, and they can all get you like a multiball quicker, or they can get you more gold for different types of things, or, you know, you get an add-a-ball or your two-times play field, or they all get a perk, which is pretty brilliant. But 20 people is a lot. Yeah. Star Wars by Stern had, like, three or four, and people freaked out. But it is very complex.
    121:25
    There's so many variations of things you can do. It's unbelievable. The thing is, the production was not that long because they weren't selling them, so they stopped making them. Then it got way more popular after that. Now everyone wants it. Yeah, this scarcity thing. But the thing about the code, this game was released, was it 2018?
    121:47
    Yes. It's still not at 1.0 code. Yeah, there still is no Final Wizard. Because there's probably only, what, 500 of these out there in the world? Yeah.
    121:56
    Like there's not very many. Which is a shame, because it deserved, I think, something a little bit better than that. I still think it will eventually be finished.
    122:06
    I still do. Well, it comes down to when Keith's got time. And does he have time to do that, or is he off doing his next game, or GNR? Or do they still have a license? I thought with every new version, depending on what they change, you have to have licensor approval. It's a really cool game. It's really neat. I'm not going to harp on it. But when it comes to the code, like if I complained a little bit about the Hobbit being confusing, this is something else on an entirely different level. But Keith has a very good rebuttal. You're complaining about the character things. But Keith says, I will admit, the Pirates is a little bit of a risk with the character thing. But people don't have to pay attention to it if they don't want to. I feel like games just have to have a lot to do and a lot to learn and stuff like that to justify their cost. I mean, we're selling games at $8,500 minimum right now. Now it's like $10,000. So if you get a game and you're done with it in two weeks, it's just not worth it. That's always been my philosophy with driving rule design at JJP. That's a very compelling thing, is that, no, the game is not made for Dave to come to Sunshine Laundromat and play it. You mean the thing I said before? How he's programming for the whole market? Yeah.
    123:16
    That's it, folks. Like, don't complain about key's code being complex, because if you're just pulling up and playing it at a show, that's not what it's for. You don't have to know the rules. You can just play. You can do basic things. I mean, you'll get slaughtered by someone who knows the rules intricately, but that's the same for any game. Here's the thing, though. Uh-oh. When I walk up to a pin, and I have no idea what's going on, and I'm flipping around and having fun, and let's say the code is way crazy and too complex and I don't understand it, but you know what, I'm going to go up and play it anyway. If I'm not having fun shooting it and it's not really grasping me with theme and it's not really all that exciting, I'm probably not going to spend $10,000 to buy it and bring it home to learn the rules. You need to play it at someone's house. You can't play this on location. I say the Jersey Tech game is above all others. You need the full experience. You need to be able to hear it. see the light shows. I totally get it. And the thing is, hey, I'm going to go, I'm going to shoot a pin. If it's kind of fun, if it's a theme I like, it's really enjoyable, yeah, I'm going to dive in, no problem. I will probably buy this pinball machine. But I'll tell you what, if I've got to spend $10,000 to get a machine home to realize that I don't like it, and then try to sell it on the secondary market and maybe take a loss, eww.
    124:36
    You know, that's a pretty precarious thing. And I think Stern, even though it is the evil empire, kind of has figured that out a little bit. Now, they don't have as much in their games, and they're not as exciting, but, you know. So there's all the, like, even there's an action button, right? And the action button with this code, you go and you hit it and you collect gold and you bump into things. That's cute. Well, what the hell is that? Well, it is cool. The guy's in the movie. I don't know what character he plays, but like you said, he did a great job. And, man, they had him read, like, 100 pages of script. There's so many lines he has. But everyone's probably just hearing him go, gold! And he just hits the button. Gold!
    125:16
    Because you've got to collect it. You've got to pull it off the table. But if you're bothered with the action button, Keith says, you don't have to get gold ever. I mean, you probably won't get to Tortuga if you don't ever go for the goal. But you don't have to play Tortuga ever to win the game. So that's what he's saying. He's like, don't get caught up in all this complicated stuff. Just have fun with the game. And then learn it. I don't, you know, I get it. I understand. Damn pinheads with their whining. So much whining. All I've done is whine. This whole podcast has been two hours of whining. You need to appreciate these games. They're complicated.
    125:48
    They had to come up with a whole new platform. And light boards were like a one issue. I would take that all day. Look at their menu. They got like nice, you know, we haven't even gone into, you know, for me, from a more tech side, go into their menu system. See the, like the switch matrix. It's got a picture of the play field and little dots, shows you what you're activating and stuff like that. So cool. But this had a myriad of editions as well. There's the standard edition, exactly the same as all the other ones. No Invisiglass, no Shaker, you know, no stuff like that. Now, the limited edition, it had the extra volume control and headphone jack. Yeah, that's not all of them so far. but it also has the 72 light display on the back of the play field panel. So the back of the play field, there's like a panel that has all these lights on it, and it gives you hints as to where you should shoot, sort of like looking into the night sky and looking at stars. So if you pay more, you get hints. It's so stupid because how do you figure out what's on that? There's just lights.
    126:53
    It's not like there's an arrow or there's another. It's just like this blinking thing. And it actually does work. You can actually figure it out. There is a pattern to it. Quit whining.
    127:03
    And then there's the collector's edition. Ooh, the collector's edition. Green armor and barnacles. It's got these barnacles on it. I wasn't a fan of that barnacle. And they're really sharp. Totally different play field art. So instead of Johnny Depp, you get the Davy Jones guy. Yeah, which is totally better because I don't want to. Really? I like Johnny Depp better. I mean, it's Captain Jack.
    127:25
    He just likes to stare into his eyes. Shipping a bottle topper, Radcals with different art, and only 200 units. 200-unit collector's edition. Can you imagine? But they didn't sell. So there's 200 of these out there, and now they sell for like $35,000 U.S. Well, those sold. The L.E. sold. But the game itself didn't sell that much. No. So there's like the most limited version of this game is probably the standard edition. So if you have a standard edition, you probably have the one that they're at the least producing. That could be said for all of the Jersey Jack games. It's, it's, CEs are like $30,000. We don't know how many were made. People went crazy for this game afterwards. There's so much hype around it, but it, you know, come on, people, use some common sense here. They, you know. Still rumors are gonna maybe renew the license and do more someday. So this brings us to Guns N' Roses, Not In This Lifetime. This is the licensed band theme, September of 2018. This is the Jersey Jack board set. Eric Minier and Saul Slash Hudson, which really takes away the mystique when you know his real name is Saul. Art by Dane Henry Jr. Jean-Paul DeWin does the animations. Sound and music by Slash and Vickis Deo.
    128:46
    Software by Keith P. Johnson, Ted Estes, Joe Katz, and J.T. Hardkey. Yeah, remember that last game where they got no assets? This is the opposite.
    128:56
    They got every asset known to man, including ones that aren't even Guns N' Roses songs. Live and let die.
    129:07
    That's what drew me the first time I saw the game. That's the thing they showed because it has the coolest live show of all of them, in my opinion, the Live and Let Die one. And I'm like, how did they get that? They don't own that. That's a Paul McCartney song. Just one phone call from Slash. Hey, Paul, can we use this? Sure. There you go. Done. So Slash is a big pinball fan. He's always been a big collector. He worked on the Guns N' Roses thing with John Borg. You can hear about that in the Borg Live in the 90s licensing dream. He doesn't have that game anymore, I believe. I think he lost that in the divorce. Yeesh. so the Guns and Roses theme here was brought to Jersey Jack by Slash himself he approached Jersey Jack and said let's make a pinball machine and he said, okay sure it's not exactly family friendly which doesn't fit within there but of course under new ownership at Jersey Jack they pretty much decided that they wanted to sell pins so they went with Guns and Roses and because you're working with Slash He is giving you concert footage from the Not In This Lifetime Tour. You're getting band posters. You're getting original audio. You get access to every band member in Guns N' Roses. It is something, something else. Yep, you get access to Appetite for Destruction, Use Your Illusion 1 and 2.
    130:42
    Unfortunately, then the other ones, Chinese Democracy. No. Now, this was probably considered one of the greatest pinball launches of all time. All of the mistakes that they had made in previous pinball launches where they kind of, ooh, you know, showed too much too soon or not enough. This one they showed an insane video and people were like, ah, I'm buying it. Let me find my wallet. And they were ready. The hype was something. Beautiful pin. and the art was fantastic. The issue with this pin... Well, they weren't ready enough. They sold out quickly, and it was like, oh, crap. They had never experienced as much demand as they did for this game. This was the first pin that they had produced in their new factory when they moved to Chicago, and that caused some issues, as well as it was released during the pandemic, which also caused a lot of supply chain issues and manufacturing issues. the other thing with this pin was that it ended up being a lot of sizzle and not a whole lot of wow just another strong take i think that the game is exactly what it needed to be it is and it is an amazing you're bringing the concert home you are experiencing a guns and roses concert regardless of my zinger there this this game is exactly what it needs to be an amazing concert experience in a box for people that generally don't know a whole lot about pinball. But the deeper you get into this code, sort of the less satisfying it becomes. So it's like a weird overcorrection for Keith Johnson. There's a lot of code in it, but it doesn't seem to kind of go anywhere. Is it too simple? It's not simple. It just doesn't seem like it's particularly rewarding. It's a very risk-reward pin. What do I mean by that, Ron? Well, like when I play, I'll give you an example. When I play this game, I don't really care if it's deep. I like to just get into a song. You get into a song. You collect band members. Once you collect all the band members, the song is ready. But, of course, I will try to lock balls beforehand because I want the maximum amount of balls. It makes the song worth more. And then you get into a song. and you'll see an insane light show. Unbelievable. And you can pick the song. So pick Live and Let Die. That's the light show. So you pick that and you play and it tells you what to shoot. There's like a little display in the back. Shoot these. Shoot these shots. And you shoot them.
    133:22
    And you just keep going as long as you can. And you can hit certain points. You can hit the saucer and there's a cash out. Do you want a cash out? Risk reward. Like no. Yeah, risk reward. Or do you cash out or do you push your luck? Now, if you drain out, you've just lost everything. But if you keep going, you can get to a point where when the song is ending, if you get it in there in the, what, five-second period at the end of the song,
    133:48
    you get to go, it cashes it out, and you get to go to encore. It goes to the next song automatically, and you start on the next song. So here's the thing. Every song, although the objectives are different, the animations are different, the light show is different, it all ends up being sort of the same thing, right? You shoot it around the play field, you put it in the scoop, do you want to cash it or not? Man, there's no making you happy. It's like, yeah, like, I don't know. I have played a lot of this as well. I have a friend with one of these, and I have played a lot of this. And it is impressive, and it is awesome. But it just, again, the play field has a couple of shots that, like, the scoop is in a, I feel like I'm always in that scoop. That makes me sad. But this is a heck of a pin. And if you're a Guns N' Roses fan, this better be in your collection. Like, it is worth every penny. It is impressive. It's got lots going on in it. It's fun. You know, but if you're expecting craziness like your regular Keith Johnson code, it's kind of not like that. Yeah, but here's the thing. In Jersey Jack's world, these LEs, they're LEs. they never really tell you what is the how many. It's supposed to be like 5,000 technically when they have an LE.
    135:09
    Yeah, this one had a 5,000 LE run. This one, I still don't think they got the 5,000, but they got as close to 5,000 probably as any game they've ever sold. They sold a boatload. They sold so many at the beginning they just ran out and then there was delays trying to get them. This is like Stern has issues keeping Godzilla you know, it's stocked, or it's so popular. This was their Godzilla. They could not build these fast enough. They literally were not ready for the demand of this game. I guess that's a testament to a few things. One of them is the brand of Eric Meunier. You know, Pirates of the Caribbean was such a great game that his follow-up game had a bit of a following. The access that they had with Splash, just the looks of the people, it is It is crazy impressive. But it has drumsticks for a riff. Why didn't anyone ever do that? That's perfect. Why didn't anyone ever do that? That's freaking me out. And the cymbals, it's got cymbals on the pop bumpers. So when the pop bumpers go, it's got like little cymbals. The guitar is the wire for them. Why didn't anyone do that? It just seems so obvious when you see it. Like, wow, why didn't anyone do that before? It's a really, really, really great pin. Is there anything about this pin that you wish would improve? I mean, to me, it's funny. this is like you consider this Jersey Jack games as home games they're games for the home for me this would be like my Jersey Jack location game yeah you want to yeah like I want to go up I want to try I want to lock as many balls as I can before I start a song I want to totally kill the song and get a huge jackpot and then I'm good I don't really need anymore that's I've had the experience I'm all set it's it is it's worth it it's a great pin a lot of people crap on it A lot of people love it. It's somewhere in the middle, guys. Like, you know, don't be all in or all out on something. Like, play it and flip it and have a good time. It's the greatest Jersey Jack game ever because it sold the most.
    137:07
    Absolutely. Any owner will tell you that. And that brings us to the end of our podcast this month, Ron, where we talked everything is lit, Keith Johnson and Jersey Jack pinball. Anything else you want to add here at the end? look forward to more Keith Johnson games I'm excited for his next one hopefully we'll see something like that in this year of 2023 yep I think we will
    137:42
    um Stewie you want to read the end can't you just like use a clip I thought David Dennis said you could just replay the whole thing People will know that he's doing that. Okay, okay. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to civilballchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all your messages, and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcatcher. Turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review. That way, more people can find us.
    138:16
    If you're interested in supporting the show monthly, there's an option available at patreon.com slash silverballcrawlicles. You are one greedy person.
    138:49
    you I'm sorry. I'm still in character. I need you to have photo for the end of the show. I love the bloopers. They're the only thing I listen to.
    139:32
    Oh, do you want me to read them? Oh, if you want to, I can cut it from another episode if you want. No. Come on. People know.
    139:41
    I'm going to give it a go. This is the train wreck that I'm just going to have to train my dog with this thing rather than my podcast. This is a wreck train that... Click, click. This is a train wreck that we'll have to go through. See what I did there? Yeah.
    139:56
    Hey, there's nothing there. Your notes suck, David. No. You're so mean. What the hell? So mean. Yes, I am mean. Come on, I expect confidence.