Think about the art. I'm at a B+. I know I'm drunk. The following is an ad-hoc radio production. And now, ladies and gentlemen, time for the show. Sit down, kick your feet up, grab a cold one, get ready for... The Super Awesome Pinball Show! That's right, it's time for everybody's favorite pinball show! With your hosts, pinball artist Christopher Franchi, Texas Pinball Festival's Ed Vanderbeek, And Dr. Pin himself, Christian Jim Weisz. Sponsored by Chicago Gaming Company, the home of top quality pinball remakes like Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, and more. Visit Chicago-Gaming.com. And by Cointaker.com, distributors of new in-box pinball machines, mods, accessories, and frangy pinball wear. Also by BackAlleyCreations.com, creators of the most badass pinball mods, Blackboro Pinballs, and the Easy Slide Playfield Support Bracket Set. That's BackAlleyCreations.com. Please focus on the show. How do you like that? Big face. That's just bloody rude. Hello, Legion of the Silver Ball, and welcome to another episode of the Super Awesome Pinball Show. Season one, episode number four. Guys, we made it to number four. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you guys doing? Doing great, man. So, in case you don't know, you got Franchi here, you got TPF Ed, and you got Dr. Pin, Christian Line and we have a fantastic show this week as we do every week is this why all the other podcasts are running to the hills? too soon Franchi, too soon too soon? okay, I won't edit that out though that's good anyway, this week we have a very personal candid interview with the legend himself Mr. Joe Kamenko which I'm so excited to do this man is my mentor so I talk to him often and I trust his word and he is a legend I mean, just look at his body of work. The guy's amazing. So, anyway, we've also got Pinball on the News. And what we've done for our past couple of weeks, this is actually the first episode where we've extended it out to three weeks. So we've got three weeks to talk about. And then we're going to draw our winners for the Munsters Contest. We have prize announcements for Barlow's Pin Pets Charity Shelter Drive. And, of course, we're going to have another update from Ed on what's coming up in TPF in 2020. Sounds good. Love it. our last few weeks of pinball. Ding! Okay, so three weeks of pinball fun we have had. And let's talk about it right now. Ed, what have you done pinball-related in the past three weeks? Well, for three weeks, for the first time, I don't have a whole lot. For the first two weeks, I went to Florida, and I was hanging out at our house there. I just worked on the laptop and did TPF stuff, signing up vendors and exhibitors and that kind of thing. This last week, I just went yesterday, in fact, and picked up that Data East Batman from my buddy Kevin. He and his partner Jessica, they do pinball restorations. They finished it, and it looks absolutely amazing. I haven't set it up yet, but I'm going to set it up and maybe post some pictures on our Facebook page for everyone to look at. But it is probably the nicest Data East Batman out there right now because it is absolutely gorgeous. Your game absolutely sucks! Other than that, I mean, right now I'm in full TPF mode. I mean, it's all signing up vendors, working on the schedule, talking to special guests, answering questions, that kind of stuff. That's what I've been doing. So, Ed, how many people do you still have to announce for TPF? Can you give us a teaser on that? Are there a lot more in the wings? Oh, damn! There's a few more. I'm still waiting on a couple of confirmations from some people. I only have, right now, what I call pinball celebrities left, a couple of designers and some industry-type people. Sylvester McCoy right now is our only Hollywood celebrity that's coming to the show. I have announced a few that are currently on the TPF website, and I'll do that in the recap here at the end of the show. But, yes, I do have some more. And I will drop one that I haven't announced yet. I think it's safe for me to drop that, so we'll do that at the end of the show too. Cool. Sweet. Yeah, exclusive. How many games do you have committed to TPF now? Right now, there's, well, three or four. On the game sign-up page, there's probably less than 100, but I'm not worried. Most people, they don't sign their games up until just a couple of weeks before the show because a lot of them, they're not sure. They're shopping out games. They're restoring them. They're trying to get them ready, and there'll be a mad rush here that last month right before the show. And I also don't have any of the manufacturers' games signed up. The manufacturers are going to bring a ton of games as well, and each of their booths are going to have several games. So we'll hit between 400 and 500 mark, I'm very confident, by the time the show shows up. It will be a full house. Is that your max capacity? No, it all depends on floor plan design. I like having a lot of people space, and I think we do a pretty good job of that. Every year it gets a little smaller and smaller, but the way to fix that is we really have to do the floor plan. There will be a new floor plan again for 2020. It will be different than it was last year. That's cool. So, you know, we kind of like the little, you know, the flowy floor plan where it's not just grocery store kitchen aisles, but there may be a little more than that just because, you know, that is the most efficient way to use space. But we'll still have some cool stuff. Yeah, I always get lost in that vendor area, like over where you got, like, Measel Mods and those guys. Like, there's no straight way through. You're kind of, like, bending around. I'm like, I'm not sure which way I'm going. Yeah. People like that, though. It's, you know, it's like a little maze, and they can, you know, they go, oh, let's over here. Well, if I'm trying to get to my table, I don't like it. I don't like there's people at your table waiting for you. God, what a dick. No, it is cool, though, because you can walk through it a couple of times and not have seen everything because it's not so linear. So I do like that. Ooh, that's a good word. Yeah. It's actually linear, not linear. Linear, man. No, you're right. I won't correct you in front of everyone, though. You can edit that shit out. But I won't. That's nice. Dr. Pink, what have you been up to? Oh, man, I had a big corporate meeting. So I've got about 52 docs in my group. And every year we get together and we have this big, you know, holiday dinner. And part of my gig there, and this will come back to pinball, but part of my gig there is that I have to do the presentation. And part of that presentation is a roast where I have to go through and I have to basically, you know, throw out a couple zingers at the partners in the group and laugh about the goofy stuff that happened over the course of the year, which there always is plenty. But this year, my wife donated a couple of incriminating pinball photos to the roast. And my buddy, who is also my co-presenter, went up there and kind of roasted me a little bit about pinball. And I keep pinball pretty close to the vest in my social life. Like, you know, obviously I'm not ashamed of it and I'll talk about it if anyone comes up to me and wants to know about it. Or if it just comes up in conversation, which it can. But I don't publicize it because even though we all think it's incredibly cool, not everybody does. And so, you know, I like to feel out the audience before I go into that. But anyway. Hey, are you the horror bangs everybody? Yeah. The presentation had a couple pictures of me playing pinball. And my partner started to like, you know, just razz on me a little bit. And he was like, you know, Christian's really into pinball. I don't know if you guys know this. He goes by Dr. Pin. And he's getting really into it. I mean, nobody knows I have a podcast yet in my work. So that's a plus for me. But he was like, yeah, when I go down the hallway and I hear him saying all this stuff now, all this pinball stuff. I heard him say, wow, guys, I just nudged that endotracheal tube in really nicely, or I totally drained that spinal, or be careful with my ventilator, you're going to tilt it. He got some laughs at my expense. That's pretty good, though, because usually if people, they're going to try to roast you and they don't know pinball, they mess it up so bad it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Exactly right. And he had come over to my house, and we had gone through some of the pinball terms, and I was trying to teach him how to play, and he used all of that against me. How about you guys? Are you in your professional lives? I mean, I know, Ed, you're retired, but you were a police officer for a long time, and I'm sure you were in pinball then. Do you guys talk about pinball to just everyone, or is it something that you kind of talk about when it comes up? No. Kim and I have our – well, since I've retired and she's gone into IT, we have kind of crossed streams sort of. But for a long time, we had our work friends and we had our pinball friends, and then, of course, we have our neighbors that live around us that we would hang out with. But very rarely did we ever talk pinball at work. and for the longest time my pinball friends didn't know what I did for a living. I always told them I just drove a truck for Dr. Pepper. Well, because when you tell them, it always turns into a, you know, they want to ask a question or complain about a ticket they got or they want to talk about Ferguson or something like that that I'm just not interested in talking about. So I would tell them I drove a truck for Dr. Pepper and that worked for years and years and years. And then when they finally found out, most people found out when Lou Ferrigno came to TPF and I took him to the police station to get an honorary badge, and he posted that on his personal Facebook page, and it got out. And so a lot of people were really surprised. But, you know, everybody was cool about it. All cops are assholes. I have no honorary badge. What kind of shit is this? I'll give you a junior police badge sticker. I got several left over. Junior police. Yeah, it's like part of the bike squad. But, no, we very rarely ever intermingled the two groups. Right. How about you, Chris? I mean, your work and your pinball life is kind of linked, but you do a lot of stuff outside of pinball, too. And we'll talk to Cam and Kyle later about some of that stuff. But is that something you publicize? Yeah, sort of, because I talk about what I do to, you know, my friends and whatnot. You know, they come to my office and there's pinball shit hanging all over the walls. So we talk about it. But, you know, it's not like I sit and talk about rules and, you know, competitions and shit like that. We just kind of basically talk very generally about pinball, but not too often because I don't usually run into too many people that often. I like to just work and go home. I don't like to go outside. I don't like people. It's too people-y outside? Yeah, it is way too people-y outside. So I stay in. Playing pinball! But yeah, I don't mind talking about it. That's cool, man. Well, that was my outside of the home environment thing. And then I bought a new pin, actually, over the last few weeks. That was my pinball day. My most exciting day was New Pinball Day. You guys know I was kind of thinking about Stranger Things. That was high on my list. And after watching the premium stream, you know, I definitely think it's a great-looking pin. But I have somewhat limited space, and I only had room for one more to go. Being a huge Eddie fan, Brian Eddy, and having, you know, weighing between Stranger Things or another one of his games, I opted for Medieval Madness. I saw one up on Pinside that was beautiful. It's got PinStadium Lights. It's got a bunch of different mods that light up. It's got the dragon mod. It's got the wizard mod. It has a topper. Is it an original? It is a remake. It's a standard remake. It doesn't have the topper. It does not have the Franchi topper, which I'm going to try and hit you up for at some point. Well, the good news is if nobody knows, or if you don't know, because I hope it's not a secret, They are making those available for people who didn't buy it with the topper. Yes. No, that is awesome news. But it won't work with us, you know, original owners that have the original medieval madness. It won't work. I mean, I guess I could stick it up there. What's the old original? You better shut up. There's lots of diehard original pubs out there, man. Hey! Get off my lawn! This has the color chip, so it's like a color D&D. It has the speaker grill. I don't know. All the bells and whistles. So it's beautiful. It's got a shaker motor. So we've been loving that. We struggled really hard with the decision between that and the Attack from Mars initially when we bought it. So I'm glad now we have both. How are you going to get the upgraded? Does it have the bigger LCD screen? No. You lose! Good day, sir! The new ones that I don't even think are out yet are going to have that. I thought they were going to make those available as well to the original buyers. It's some kind of a good deal. How are they going to do that, though? It's going to be tough because unless you get a whole new speaker. You need a new head. Yeah, it'll be. No, you don't need a new head. I think it's, you know what, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. I thought they were going to make it available for everybody, but maybe I'm wrong. It's possible. It's possible. Because I do think you can detach that whole unit, but it has the screen and the speaker grills, you know, all in that same thing. So you'd have to take that whole piece out and replace it, which is doable, I guess. But, yeah, very excited. It plays really well. So I'm really happy with it. Of course it does. It's made by one of our sponsors. That's right. Chicago's gaming company, chicago-gaming.com. Hi, Francie, what have you been doing? All kinds of stuff. Well, let's start with the highlight of the week. A couple weeks ago, I started thinking about doing something special for TPF, something to bring along, because I don't want to lug a crap ton of artwork, and, you know, I'll bring some stuff, but I wanted to do something special. That's, like, my new thing now is, like, to do something special for a show that I go to. And I decided quite secretly that I was going to do a JAWS translate, which I did, and I showed it on Facebook, and holy crap. For the past week, I've been doing nothing but fielding messages and text messages and Facebook messages and everything. Like, I had to up the number from 50. Originally, I was just going to do 50, and I had to up it from 50 to 75, and I've got people wanting more than one. Wow, there's, like, vultures are coming to the table. Like, I want to get two and resell one because it's going to sell out. So, anyway, very happy about that. And there will be some news on how you can get one of those for free coming up later in the show. So, anyway, yeah, been working on that for the past couple of weeks and finished that up. Chris, that's gorgeous, by the way. It's a freaking awesome Translight, and it's a dream theme for a lot of people. So I think you're going to sell out of those pretty darn fast. Well, you're never going to get it like that because it's got the three actors on it. Yeah, talk about that, right? Because it was rumored to be a title at Stern that they were going to possibly make, and then I guess because they couldn't get all the assets, they passed? I have no idea. Okay. I could not tell you. I've heard the same things from outside people, but during my time with Stern, I heard nothing about it. I don't know. Gotcha. Yeah, that's pretty much the deal. The only reason Funko was able to make little Funko Pops of them was because they're stylized. They don't look like the actual actor. They just resemble the character because of the costume and whatnot. But it's like this big rounded off head with big black eyes. You know, it doesn't, big black eyes like Doe's eyes. When he comes at you, he doesn't seem to be living. But, yeah, so. Doesn't seem to be living in garbage, stupid shark. No, so that's the cool thing is that, you know, when you're just making it like a tribute thing, you just put, you know, whatever you want on it. And that's kind of, if someone had the license and you could use the actors, that's how I would have done it. So, yeah, so I'm real happy with that. And let's see. My Captain Fantastic has a faulty rollover star. Or I should say star rollover. It keeps getting stuck. And when it gets stuck, you can just hear it going, because it's an EM, you know, and that's what they do. Right. And then when the ball drains and you go to shoot the next ball, it kicks. You lose a ball. It goes from one to two or whatever. Because of that star being down, it just, for some reason, kicks forward a ball to the next one. And I don't know what's happening. It's not like the thing's going to blow up. So I've got to take the glass off, slide it down, smack the thing around, and let it pop back up. I can send you a new star. Well, yeah, but it's the whole piece and shit, isn't it? I don't really know, but don't I have to take the whole insert out? No, the star pushes down, and on the bottom side, there's like a nipple that keeps it from popping all the way back up to the top. And then you cut that, pull it out, take the new one, snap it in, and, you know, you've got a brand new star in there. I don't think it's the star because I had the play field. You just said it was the star. Well, I had the play field re-cleared, and I think the cutout for the star is clogged up. Oh. Oh, well, yeah, you need to take an X-Acto knife or something and shave some of that. Oh, sorry. Well, clear off the inside of the star cutout. Our pal from Australia, what's his name, Rodin? Rodin. Something like that. Yeah, sorry to you, sir, for screwing up your name. He suggested these little files, and he sent me a link, and I bought them on Amazon. They're real thin, real flat, thin files. You can kind of get into that little crack. So I'm going to take it apart and F with it and see what I can do. But so, yeah, now I've got to deal with that. So as if Captain Fantastic isn't irritating enough being a fucking drain monster, now I've got to deal with the rollover thing. Now, how often do you guys wax your playfields? Because I found that when I wax them, if I'm not really keeping a close eye on where that wax is going, sometimes it will clog up those little areas around the rollovers. And then that can junk it up and cause it to click when you're... And that's why I don't wax them. Well, no, you just keep a soft toothbrush, and then you go, after you wax it, you go around the star posts and the little areas where the wax will get in, and you clean it out real good, and then you go back over it again with your terrycloth, and you are good to go. Gotcha. The toothbrush. There you go. Okay. Toothbrush. Okay, so continuing on the week, I had to call our good friend Jason Fowler from Slap Save. Did you guys happen to notice what their episode was this week? The Satisfying episode? Yes. I did hear that. Yes. And not only did they name it that, but then they said Satisfying about 700 times. Yeah. And as I was listening to it, I was thinking in my head, Franchi is probably going insane, and I wonder if they did this just to jab at Franchi. Well, I was going insane. I called him up. He had no idea that I had this phobia, and he was very interested. He's like, now tell me, what's wrong with this word? Why do you not like it? And I'm like, well, when was the last time you said that? Like, you know, wow, this corndog is really satisfying. You know, people just don't use that word. I understand that it's a normal word and it fits the situation, but it's just not, it's almost too technical of a word to use. People would just say, wow, that shot's really cool. That shot's really fun. You know, whatever. We've been through this already. But I had to explain it to him and he just thought it was funny. And I said, I'm going to go through your episode, and I'm going to edit out every satisfying and put it together, put them all together back to back, and then just scream over it and play it on the show. And I got about five minutes into it, and I couldn't hear the word anymore. Like, I'm just like, I can't do this. Like, it's driving me nuts. If you don't edit, I mean, you edit this show so much. Why would you want to do more editing, dude? Well, yeah, the editing would have been a pain in the ass. But it was just hearing the episode was bad enough. having to hear it again. And I'm not saying their episode sucks. I'm saying because of the word. So anyway, I thought that was funny. And then we're doing the Barlow's Pinpet Shelter Drive. I ordered a bunch of junk and it all came in today. So we got this giant pile of stuff. I put a picture on the Facebook page. So just so you guys know, we're not asking you to do anything that we're not afraid to do ourselves. So we're plenty stocked with $500 worth of food and treats and toys and blankets and all that that are going to go to the Michigan Humane Society this weekend, and I will take pictures, and I will get pictures of the puppies. And hats off to some of the people. I know of two people offhand, just off the top of my head, that went in to drop off donations and picked up a dog. It came home with a dog. That's so cool. Yeah, I saw that picture on our page, and what a great story, man, to come in there and just do this for a – I'm sure that people would do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but with a little motivation of this contest, a lot of people have done it, and to actually adopt when they're there, that's huge. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the end goal. Of course we want to take care of them, and I'm buying them toys and all this stuff because I want them to not just live but to try and have some fun too because they don't have families to play with them. And the end goal is obviously to adopt. So if we can get people to go in there and adopt when they're dropping off supplies, that's awesome. I know another guy delivered a dog to somebody who was adopted. So, and this cute little female bulldog named Muffin or something. Muffin. It was a cute little name like Biscuit or Dumpling. I think it was Dumpling. Yeah, it was Dumpling. Yeah, so that's very cool. But anyway, so yeah, we did get a bunch of this stuff, and then we're going to drop it off. And we'll go over the details of that. All the prizes are in, and we're ready to give all the details on what's going on with that. You're not going to want to not take part in this. And then last but not least, my daughter, who I've been trying to turn into a pin file, has adopted a favorite game. Oh, yeah? And in true daughter fashion, it's not one of the ones I drew. I knew that was coming. All right, so don't tell us what it is. Let's guess. Oh, you want to guess? Yeah, give us some hints. Give me some hints. Yeah, tell us the manufacturer. Williams. Okay. DMD game? I'm trying to think. I think so. I'm going to say Circus Voltaire. No, but that's awesome. No, it's not. Ed, do you have a guess? Not at the end. Fishtails. Nope. All right. What is it? Big Guns. No shit. I would never have guessed that. Yeah, that's not a DMD game. No, it's not. It's got a weird-looking scorebox thing. Something's going on in the back. I've never played this game, but it looks interesting. There's some kind of deal going on behind the back glass. It's a very unique game. I remember thinking when I played this that it came totally out of left field because it's got some really cool mechs in it that I hadn't seen in any other game before I played this with, like, you know, the balls shooting up, going into the wire forms at cool angles that you don't normally see. And then isn't there a bagatelle in the back? It's not a bagatelle, but it's similar. Yeah, there's something going on back there. I can't quite tell what it is, but who's on the skirt going on the big guns? Well, that's a Mark Ritchie game. I didn't know that you could do that. Ed, I love that you're screen sharing, and you're so lucky that you don't have porno on your computer screen right now. I don't know. Look up at the top there. Oh, look, he shuts it down. Oh, no, wait, what did I do? Wait, I didn't mean to do that. Oh, share screen, there you go. Something said promo, and I thought it said promo. No, no, I got PayPal. Can you see what I'm doing right now? Oh, my God, dude, you order a ton of stuff from Marco's Specialties and Pinball Life. Wait, what's the promo foam finger? Are you getting a TVF foam finger? Well, I was thinking about, yeah, I'm always looking for fun stuff to get, so I was like, well, you know, we get some of these, you know, the number one foam fingers. Are you getting super awesome on that or TPS? This was like, I don't know, some more promotional stuff. Discount mugs, stress balls. I'm always looking at promotional stuff to give away. People like stuff, so I don't mind that. TPF makes money and we spend it, so we buy stuff for people to have fun with. Speaking of, I just bought some holographic super awesome pinball stickers today. So did I. You did? So did I. Yeah, I saw that and I got really excited. I'm like, oh, my God, they finally got holographic stickers. Which ones did you do? The logo or something else? No, I didn't do the pin people. I did logos. Okay, I did that too. All right, well, that's extra. Yeah, because you can only get 50. And it sucks, you know, like, I don't know if you tried, but like when they would have these specials and it was stuff that I liked, I would just go in and order a sticker, come back out, go back in, order another sticker. You know, I'd get like six different ones whenever they had a special. There's no limit? No, they blocked it now. Now you try to do it a second time and they're like, you know. Ah. So I'm going to have someone else. I wanted to get some Barlow holographic stickers, so I'm going to have someone in the office order it for me. Well, have Sarah do it. There's ways around it. All right. I could do that, too. Whatever. No, I don't want to bug anyone else. I'll just get someone in the office to do it. That way it gets mailed here anyway. So. Right. Because if Sarah did it, it would go to you guys, and you'd have to send it to me to be an asshole. Yeah, that's true. Anyway, so, yeah, that's it. Well, I was really excited that my daughter went to, oh, yeah, as a bonus, she's like, well, we're going to stop up at this bar. She went to a Tilted bar in Jackson, Michigan, which is funny because it just got pressed for something, and I was reading it, and, like, the next day she's like, hey, we're at this bar, Tilted. I'm like, what the? And she sent me a picture before she said the name, and I'm like, I recognize that from somewhere. So she won $800 on the Keno there while she was there. Oh, shit. Keno is, like, one of the hardest things to win. It's, like, the worst odds ever. Yeah. You want to hear a funny Keno story? Sure. No, it's not pinball, but I'll tell it real quick. A buddy of mine was up at a bar by my house playing Keno, and he calls me up, and he's just super depressed. He's like, I played Keno a million times. I'm done with one shit. I'm throwing all my money away. I'm bummed out. Come up and have a beer with me. Cheer me up. So I come up there, and the table, like he's sitting at a booth, and the table's covered with easily 50 slips. He's just going to town. I don't know if he won anything at all, but he didn't win anything good, that's for sure. And I'm like, wow. And I'm like, how do I take the heat off? I'm like, well, I'll bet some, and, you know, that way he'll see me lose, too, and he won't feel so bad. And I won $700. That's awesome. He's just like, why did you come up here? Ass. You're supposed to cheer me up. And he just took my $700. Love it. That's the game they're playing at the end of Vegas Vacation with Sid Caesar, and they win all their money back playing Keno, or he wins that ticket. That's a great scene. That's my funny Keno story. All right, guys, well, that's it for our weeks in pinball. and next up we now have Pinball in the News. And now, Pinball in the News with your super awesome eyewitness news crew. Alright. First up in the news, Stern reveals Stranger Things Projector on a live stream with Brian Petty. I watched a little bit of this just so I would be informed. And I have my thoughts. Did you guys watch it? I did. I did. We watched... I think we watched the whole thing, actually. It wasn't super long. It was like, I don't know, maybe an hour, hour and a half. And the big thing here was the projector. So we finally got to see it. It was done in a pretty well-lit room, and they made a huge point of that. They kept kind of changing the camera angle so you could see how bright the room was. Because they've been catching some heat that maybe the game wouldn't fit in a lineup in a well-lit space. And I've got to say, it worked really well. I was pleasantly surprised with how good the projector performed under those circumstances. I will say that a couple of things that I wasn't crazy about were the ramps. I don't think they were used with the projector quite as much as they should have been, and I'm pretty sure that they said that that was something they were going to change. But during the gameplay, there was a lot of stuff that was being projected, and the ramps were just like Zac Stark white. And then once you started a mode, you would see little arrows on the ramps, and that was, I guess, all you saw on the ramps. So that could definitely be improved. Yeah, the things that I didn't like were, first of all, I thought it was kind of washed out. You could see it, but it didn't have good contrast. The blacks were not black. that was like gray and white instead of black and white. I mean, colors, but, you know, the white was white, but the black was not black. And, yeah, I just didn't see the point. You know, it would look much better if they put a spinning arcade sign in there, an actual arcade sign, you know, a sculpted one with, you know, the logo stickers on it or whatever. And then an insert saying, shoot ramp here. Do we need, like, little dancing arrows going up the ramp? I just thought it was not the best use of that technology. I will say that there were some things that showed what the projector could do that were really cool, like the drop targets in front of the Demogorgon ramp. Yeah, the spiral thing. Oh, my God, so cool. It spelled Will, and there were flames that were moving on the drop targets. That was incredibly cool. And then the spinner, you could see that kind of weird psychedelic effect on the spinner. That looked really neat. So I think if they spend the time to really optimize the projector and get the ramps going and make sure that it has all the clips in there from the show that they can possibly fit in there. I think the projector could be very, very cool. I just don't know for some, you know, this is a very light-heavy hobby. We like our lights. That's why Penn Stadium has blown up so much. So if you have a collection in your home, like for me, I put in lighting specifically for pinball so that I could just like freaking blast my machines with lighting. I have PinStadiums in a lot of my games. I don't know if it will still fit in really well in that type of environment, even though it did show up well, I mean, better than I thought it would be. Will you have to stop playing the game, turn the lights off to optimize the experience? I just don't know if it's going to look that much better in the dark. I assume it would. Yeah, and if they take precautions to make sure they don't wash out the screen with the GI and whatnot, then it's just going to end up being a really dark game. Right. You know so it you know you win one you lose the other You know I don know I just I not feeling it with this game I don like the artwork It just seems so shallow and it just seems like they took one thing and just focused on that and you know all the artwork is very cold pinks and purples and blues and you know just it seems like the projector and the screen dropping down with the Demogorgon in there, it's like the feature in the game. Other than that, there's like ramp, ramp, orbit, orbit, nothing, nothing. You know, that's, I'm not feeling it. And a lot of people have said that the Demi-Gorgon shot can be tough, and you have to kind of set up your machine so that you can even get that shot, you know, make that shot, and that's kind of rough. Some people are having problems with the post that pops up to hold the balls in the back. They're just, like, shooting out of the hole. Yes. So, yeah, there's definitely problems. What do you think, Ed? Well, you guys were just taking it away, so I was letting you all talk. I haven't seen the Stranger Things in person yet. I've seen a little bit of the video with the projector. I do like the idea of the projector. I think that I like those kind of toys, you know, when they're added to new games. I commend Stern for doing those types of innovative type new toys. I really like the laser on Star Trek when they did that on the LEs with the laser that, you know, shined on the play field. I like that kind of stuff, but I have yet to see a Stranger Things in person. Try not to judge off videos because oftentimes it's hard to, I mean, you can get an idea of what it's supposed to do, but until I can see one in person, I'm not going to say I like it or don't like it. I mean, I like what I see, but I'm really hoping when I see it in person, you know, we're going to be like, wow, that is awesome. You could drown a toddler in my panties right now. Man, I freaking love the theme. And I think they put a lot of call-outs in there. There's a lot of cool clips that they use on the projector. So if they can continue that and keep putting in more voices and more video and they work on the code a little bit and they tighten up the shot for the Demogorgon so that that's consistent, I think it could be a lot of fun to flip. But I don't think it has enough in it to really make me say, man, I really need this game. But, you know, it's certainly not as bad as, you know, some people are saying it is. I think it definitely is a fun-looking game to play. Owning it is a different story. Right. I find it funny how quickly people have just kind of forgotten about Elvira and Jurassic Park, and those games haven't even been out that long either. It's like every game. It's a stranger thing. Every time a new game is out, those old games are like, they don't even talk about them anymore. Oh, that's right. Elvira? Huh? What? Jurassic Park, though, has some staying power. just because it's such a good game. People are still talking about that one and seeing how much they want to buy it, and that's pretty rare, as you said, in this hobby. Like once the new shiny is out, everything else kind of gets forgotten about, but Jurassic Park is held on. The latest I've heard is that it's the best Stern game of all time. That's right. That's what's going around now. What do you guys think? Can you think of others that you would consider better? No, I haven't played it, so I have no – I want to. I just – I have no point of reference. So I've seen it. It looks fun, but I want to play it. Of course, you're older. I'm thinking about Stern games. I mean, ACDC, pretty awesome. That's one of my favorite Stern games, even though I don't have one right now. I had a back-and-back limited edition once upon a time, but someone wanted it way more than I did, so I sold it. But best game ever? Man, you're talking. There's a lot of good Stern games out there when you think about the titles over the years. I know. It's a pretty weighty statement, but then people sit down and think. Lord of the Rings? You know, Lord of the Rings or Sopranos. There's some good titles out there. I like Sopranos. I know a lot of people, you know, I like Sopranos. You're like a little stripper on the pole, do you? The Talking Fish is pretty awesome, I've got to say. But I can't think of any game that I would say definitely is better than Jurassic Park. So I hesitate to say it's the best, but I don't know if I can think of anything that's better. I love Ripley's. I have that in my collection. That's a super fun pin, but I think Jurassic Park would take the edge. But like Elvira Elvira's not even done With I don't think Jurassic Park Either I mean Elvira's only on .87 Or something like that Code wise So it hasn't even got All the way up to the top Yet either so Yeah it's Lyman code So it's going to be awesome But it's going to take Two years to get there That's okay I got two years I'm not going anywhere Alright so next up Spooky reveals Free toppers to everybody Who bought the game On the first day Which was all 750 people So 750 free toppers That's pretty impressive That's just It's just another, I don't know, another what? Candy cane in the stocking of how perfect they rolled this game out? Yeah, it really is. It was a flawless reveal. And Spooky is doing nothing but good from a marketing standpoint and just endearing people in the hobby to that company, which is only going to serve them well moving forward. I mean, they're already one of the most loved companies out there and, you know, a free freaking topper. that's that's insane when the r2d2 uh topper is you know close to a thousand bucks and took forever and you know it's limited and i haven't seen it so i can't really gauge uh but but yeah i mean giving a free topper that is just an unbelievably cool very generous but what's that is what's that is once it comes out and people see it they're gonna go oh it doesn't move or nothing. This thing sucks. No one wants to read it. It does move though, right? There's a motor in it. I think the portal in the background spins. At least that's what it looks like. Oh, are you seeing pictures? I have not seen a picture. You want to see my first boner? Yeah, it's Rick and Morty and then there's a big green, you know, the portal. The Rick and Morty portal thing that's behind them. And in their release that they put out there, they did say that there was a motor in it. So I'm just assuming that spins. And if it's linked to the gameplay, that could be really cool. Unfortunately, people will still go, it sucks. No, of course. Because... No, they will not because pinball people are the nicest people out there. You just ask anybody. They will tell you. Such a crock of shit. Well, let's talk about all the podcasts that are dropping like flies. Oh, man. Because the pinball people are not the nicest people out there. Well, for one, Supernova. Did you read that guy's retirement letter? His letter of resignation? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. An exit interview, almost. Yeah, it's talking about basically just poison people and being unappreciated. I fear that I might qualify for one of the things he was talking about, which was something about the over-the-top pinball personalities. That's right, old and new. I would say anyone who provides content to the pinball community is doing it for free, usually. And they're putting a ton of time into it. And this guy has been doing this for years and years and put out some really great videos, some great articles. So, you know, it's a bummer that he is now kind of disillusioned with the whole hobby. And hopefully, eventually he'll come back to it because he's done a lot for it. And I think people will miss his content. It's another problem with the Twippies. The Twippies is very much, I don't care what anybody else says, is very much a click thing. And if you're not in the click or if you're not in one of the clicks, you don't have a chance. And that's why he got completely ignored in his website. He was saying that Marco's website, nothing against Marco's website, but they're just a retailer. And Pinball Life, people selling pinball products, they got selected over him. And he's like, I'm busting my butt doing all this news and shit. Yeah, but I disagree with you, Chris. It has nothing to do with the clicks. Again, we talked about this before. It has to do with who knows you and your marketing. That's a click. That's right. I know. I agree. It's not, though. It's not a click. It's not a good old boy system. It's how far your reach is and how many people you can get to respond and go vote for you. And one might even say that means you're the best. If you've got that many people voting for you, then you deserve to win. Some people think that's not fair. Well, it shouldn't be best. It should be favorite. Yeah. Because everybody voted for you doesn't mean that you're the best. It means that everybody picked you. That's what I mean. I mean, if people are voting for you, and I actually thought of a – that people can say, go vote for me, and if your reach is far enough or you've got connections in marketing or whatever, and you can actually, you know, how many people that aren't really into pinball are going to that website and voting because they know somebody who's, you know, they've got a friend, and so they're going to go vote for them because they ask. I mean, everybody who's been nominated has gone to their personal Facebook page and said, hey, please, you know, go to this website, vote for me, and then on the rest of the categories, if you don't know, then take your best guess. but I was thinking about this the other day and Jeff Patterson, if you're listening take it or leave it, I think if Jeff had some kind of an email registration where you could sign up for his email blast or whatever and he was going to put out a weekly email and you had to register, only people that were registered on the This Week in Pinball email group were eligible to vote and so I think that would eliminate a lot of because a lot of people that don't care The last thing they want is another spam email that something they're not interested in, you know, if they're not into pinball. But if you're into pinball and you're passionate about it, you're not going to mind getting those emails from This Week in Pinball, and you're going to be happy to put your email address into that group. Anyway, that was just my idea. Plus, Jeff would build a huge, you know, a huge marketing email list from that that he could use, you know, to further promote This Week in Pinball. But that was just one of his ideas. But it would just prevent bots. I'm a skeptic, so it would just prevent a thousand people from some country that don't care about pinball that somebody's figured out a way to ask them to go vote for them. I don't know if that's happening or not. It's probably not. But the choo-choo's way off the track at this point. So we lost head-to-head. Man, it's been a heavy few days for podcasts. Head-to-head is always going to be special for me. This is the first podcast I ever listened to. and they've had some of the best interviews ever done. They've got, you know, they had such good chemistry between their hosts. I almost crashed my car a couple of times laughing at, you know, how funny that show was. So I'm really going to miss those guys. I consider all three of those guys my friends. And they did a huge service for the pinball community, doing all the work to put out that entertainment. So kudos to those guys, and I hope we see them again in the future. I know Joe Lemire actually just put up a little teaser on Facebook today about maybe a new partnership with Jeff Parsons on the Pinball Players podcast, which I think would be awesome. So it's good to see him still in the game. I already told Joe, I said, you might want to look for another gig because you get about six episodes a year with Jeff. Jeff is like, he's the editing king when it comes to just putting in cool little music bits and pinball-related sound bites and that sort of thing. So I think he takes a long time to really make every episode perfect. He takes a long time to get around to every episode. That's true. That's true. It's quality, though, when it comes out. It's quality over quantity, Franchi. Yeah. So, yeah, I'll miss those guys as well. We're also losing. We didn't lose yet. We have two more episodes, apparently, but a special one lit. But the rumor is they're going over to this pinball network thing or whatever, so we may not have to miss them too much because they'll be back. Twip is down for the count for right now, anyway. Plans on possibly coming back. And I said pinball supernova. Anybody? What is that? What is that? Is somebody doing like making microwave popcorn or something? Yeah, that's, yeah. Sorry, I was trying to hit my mute button, so start over. Oh, no worries. Yeah, it was a special one that was a force too, man. Right out of the gate, they had so many big name interviews, and they've grown the streaming channel from then, and both of the hosts are just really good down to earth dudes, so they'll be missing. And as you said, hopefully we'll see them again at this pinball and everything. Nobody really knows exactly what that is. And then the Twit Podcast was really great too. I mean, these are three of the heavy hitters. Yeah. Also, the Canadian Pinball Podcast, which I'm unfortunately sorry guys never heard of. Maybe they're a little too Canadian and they don't reach into the States. I don't know. But, well, it is going to be sad to see these guys go. And each one of them has been playing, like, you know, these emotional songs to send themselves off. And taking a look at this group of comrades and friends, I think that we need something equally as emotional to let them know how we feel about losing them. So we talk before the show, and we pick a little something that we want to take a few minutes to play for you, and it goes something like this. Okay. Okay. That was good, man. I mean, everyone's going to know the joke is coming, but that was good. That was really good. I paused my mic so I wouldn't laugh. A little Rick Roll action for you. Just kidding. Seriously, we're going to miss you guys. Yeah, I mean, here's the good news. We can lose three of the best podcasts out there. We still have plenty of great stuff to fill out with our podcatchers. We've got Pinball Profile with Jeff Diolis, Pinball Players Podcast, Slam Tilt, Meltdown, Loser Kid, Riptide, Pinball Nerds, and, of course, Macho Man. Oh, Macho Man. You know, I talked to Macho Man this week. You did? Yeah, yeah. We got a little interview with Macho Man. He wants to talk to the podcast Macho Man, so take it away, Macho. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce truly one of the all-time greats in professional wrestling, the Macho Man, Randy Savage. This guy that calls himself Macho Man ain't nothing but an imposter gang. Yeah, he's ripping off the Macho Man, and the Macho Man's not too happy about it, because I am the cream of the crop. Oh yeah, I'm the cream of the crop, I'm the Macho Man! And you, Macho Man imposter, ain't nothing but a turd on my boot, yeah. And I'm gonna wipe that turd right off of my boot, oh yeah. And you think you can take a little bit? Well, no one takes a little bit from the Macho Man! Still in your boot, in that Macho T-shirt, it's a bunch of crap. Yeah, it's a bunch of crap. Oh, you're giving the money to the little kids, are ya? Yeah, but you're nothing but lies. A whole bunch of lies! The biggest bunch of lies I ever heard. I hate you. I hate your guts. And that's what's going to be left all over the map when I'm done with you. I've been lying, yeah. From the top to the bottom. And the Macho Man's not going to take it anymore. No. So you can take your crappy podcast and shove it up your butt. And then do a 360. And then another 360. And then a 180. Because the Macho Man hates you. I hate you. And your crappy impression. You don't sound like no macho man, can you? You sound like Kermit the Frog, gurgling turds in his mouth. The macho man's coming for you. Yeah. The macho man's coming for you. Woo, yeah. Let's get out of here a little bit. Well, some pretty strong words from the macho man there, I think. That was hilarious. I don't know about the whole Kermit the Frog thing, but the rest of it was very funny. Kermit the Frog gurgling turds in his mouth or something. Oh, come on, man. Anyway, just to be clear, that was a joke. We're not trying to start anything. And we wish the macho man imposter all the best luck in the world with this entertaining podcast. And welcome to the family. Anyway, we're going to go on break, and we're going to be back with the winners from our Munsters drawing. So stick around. We'll be right back. Guess what? I got a fever. And the only perspective is the super awesome pinball show. Oh, yeah! Super! Yeah! This show is sponsored by Cointaker, distributor of brand new full-size authentic Stern pinball, Chicago Game, Raw Thrills arcade games, and much more. Also, a full line of dramatic pinball mods, LED flipper kits, speaker lights, custom laser LED toppers, playfield protectors, Valley Williams parts, pinball apparel, and much more. Get the latest releases and glam out your game room with Cointaker. Everything at your fingertips at Cointaker.com. Get your game on. It's Wildfire, an electronic pinball game that's pinball fun for most everyone. Hey, beat that score. Wildfire's three-speed baller light. Beat it up. Bumps off bumpers, flips off flippers. Flip too fast, you might lose it. Wildfire keeps score for up to four players. Six pin-like batteries not included. Wildfire, it's pinball fun for most everyone. Wildfire from Parker Brothers. Hey everybody, it's Mark Rizzi here. You are listening to the super awesome Pinball Show. Now, back to our program Well, it's about frickin' time I am the God of Hellfire And I bring you The Super Awesome Pinball Show It's the coolest show All right, we're back with the super awesome pinball show, and we get to pick a winner for our big Munsters drawings. Now, I don't know if you've not been paying attention, but for the past, what, three weeks or so, or the last two shows anyway, we've been advertising that if you send us a picture of you with your Munsters pinball machine, or any Munsters pinball machine, you will be entered to win Fantastic Munsters Prizes, which is a limited edition of 700 purple vinyl Munster soundtrack, which is cool all by itself. But then you also get an autographed picture from Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster. And then our runner-up winner will win just the signed picture from Butch Patrick. But, Ed, we're going to have another Munster's contest because we have more interesting stuff to give away. We have a new sponsor, which would be Matt from Back Valley Creations, who is providing us with a complete set of Munsters mods. Oh, I want that. The light-up speaker kits, the little drippy stuff, the lunchbox. I don't know. We went through the whole list of things, and it sounds like $1,000 worth of crap. Not crap. Cool stuff. And we also have a Munsters artist proof from when we did the special event with Pat Priest and Butch Patrick at TPF last year. Oh, yeah. So it's going to be signed by, it is signed by Butch Patrick and Pat Priest, And it's also signed by the entire Munsters pinball team, including myself. Thank you very much. Thank you. Very cool. You know, I've got some extra of the VIP badges and lanyards that when we did that Munsters VIP package, I printed up more than what we actually needed. So I can throw one of those in there. It's just a plastic, you know, Munsters VIP badge. It's pretty cool. It wasn't really part of the VIP package, but it's kind of a neat thing. They can hang it on the side or throw it away if they don't want it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, so we got the mod set, we got the print, and I think we have one more signed picture of Butch Patrick. So we're going to have another Munsters giveaway at some point. Okay, so now I'm going to pick the winners for this contest. And we're shaking them up. I'm going to give you the sound effects here. We have a lot of entries for this and some really good shots. We have people fully dressed up. They are in these little post-it notes that are folded over and stuck to themselves so they wouldn't accidentally open up. Okay, the runner-up is Mr. Kelly Daniels. All right. Congratulations, Kelly. You win an autographed picture of Butch Patrick. Also Eddie Munster. Okay, I'm going to shake him up again. And this is our grand prize winner for the signed photo and the record album. And the winner is David John Rendon. All right. Congrats, David. David John Rendon, you win the album and the signed photo. If both of you could contact us through Facebook and we can get your information, we'll send that stuff out to you. And if we don't hear from you in the next week, we will reach out to you. So congratulations, guys. Being kind to people is like investing money in the bank. When we put kindness in, we get kindness back with interest. Yay. You know, what's funny is I just looked up David John Rendon's photo that he submitted, And his caption was, I win. He's a fortune teller. Yes, right. What does this guy know? Amazing. But thank you, everybody, for entering. That was fun. It was cool to see your pictures. And so, okay, we are going to move on to interview one of the masters of pinball, one of the kings. His name is synonymous with pinball. Oh, what a joke. Tell me it's fun. My guest tonight is Joe Camenco. Mr. Joe Camenco. All right. All right. So how are you doing, Joe? Good, Chris. Good to talk to you. Very happy to have you. If anybody doesn't know this, I probably don't share it very often with a large amount of people, but Joe is my mentor. He's a man that I trust. I trust you more than I trust most people, and I actually talk to you more than I talk to most people because I don't like people in general. Anyway, so, yeah, I'm glad you came on. We have an interview that's basically going to kind of circle around your days at Data East, and then we're going to touch on the Beatles and then just go into the future of Kapow, if there is one. But, you know, we'll keep people hanging on and waiting to find out about that. You know, I was at places before that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but a lot of this stuff's been covered, so we just kind of, we didn't want to do this three-hour, you know, keep you on the phone forever and go through the whole span of everything. We just kind of wanted to focus on some particular parts. Sure. Would you like to discuss, like, sort of a Cliff Notes version of your history leading up to Data East? Not at all. We have a couple questions about how you got started. You'd grown up in Maryland, and your father had worked as a distributor for a general vending company, and Bally as well. Is that kind of where you first caught the gaming and pinball bug? Right. He started in 1963 at General Vending. I was about five. And I would go in on Saturdays. He would go into work. He was a controller. And I'd play games and eventually stuff, brochures and envelopes. And they would mail out to their customers. I guess that was the fax blast of that day. And, you know, Saturday I would kind of, you know, roam around for a couple hours on every Saturday and play all the different games. that were always new and coming in. And then in 74 or so, he moved and became Senior Vice President of Valley, ran Valley Northeast. Valley had three distributorships, Valley Northeast and the Newland area, Empire in Chicago, and there was Advance in San Francisco, and they kind of covered the whole country. And Dad also worked with Valley Corp and was one of the first people to ever bring Nintendo to the country and helped them with a lot of the Japanese relationships with Namco and others years later. So in my teenage years, I would spend afternoons working there, occasional summer. I remember one summer I had to catalog. Dad bought the whole inventory of Seaberg, I think, and we had 38 trailers of Seaberg jukebox parts that I got to count, catalog, and record every one of them. So that was one of my more fun summers. But I was sort of around it then, and then while I was in college, I started operating games. I was buying from the distributorship and had a couple hundred games operated on the street around 1979, 1980 in the New Robert Englunds area. Wow, a couple hundred. Yeah, that's a lot of games for a college kid to manage. Yeah, I had a variety of colleges around New Robert Englunds and some vending, as a matter of fact, too. So were you more into pinball or arcade games when you were younger? Whatever was new. Obviously, Gottlieb was king back then at General Vending. Valley hit its prime in the days of Future Spa and Dolly Parton and Groundshaker. That was sort of the era that Dad came into the business. Of course, he was also Williams Distributorship, so we had things like Flash and Firepower and Blackout and other things at that time. But I also owned a small chain of arcades in Maryland called That's Entertainment. We were testing for all the manufacturers in the early 80s, and some of the games were really lousy, and I was one day kind of talking to a guy going, boy, I think I can make a better game than the one I just bought, and he goes, well, I know I could, because I'm a programmer and I'm an engineer. He worked at Westinghouse Missile Systems. Yeah, and we started a company a few months later, and that's sort of how I got in the game side. We sold a right of first refusal to our first game to Williams in, like, 1980, 81. I went to work for Williams. Was that Defender? Well, that was Defender Pinball I was part of, But we actually made a game called Playball, and later part of Turkey Shoot, the company made it. But when Stroll gave us an in-the-door, we were going to make it with or without him, or we were going to make it with Nintendo or Gary Stern, and that's how I started in the business. Then I came to Chicago in 1982 and went to work at Williams itself proper and did marketing and testing, ran the test program and learned to make it. And that's where you, when you were working at Williams, you acquired the rights to do the Space Shuttle pinball machine, and that was pretty much like the first license? Well, what kind of happened then, you know, we were there through games like Mystic Marathon and Sinistar and the video business. We went down with Star Rider. The video business kind of collapsed in front of our eyes. I mean, this literally blew away. Then the company made a couple, you know, we did Firepower 2 and a couple other games, but nothing was really selling. And basically what happened is that we showed Star Rider the show of November of 83. And then I think around January of that time, we had a huge, massive layoff. And literally the whole factory was closed. They shut it down. William and Castro said, we don't get like 4,000 orders. We're not reopening. Williams is finished. That was before they tried to get into the phone business. So there were a couple of playfields bouncing around. Eugene had gone off. Eugene Jarvis had gone back to Stanford that fall to get his MBA. And he wasn't back. He was still working on his Devastator game, I think, at the time. And Mark Ritchie was working on a game called Sorcerer. And Barry Alzer was working on a game. And we came up with the theme of Space Shuttle. And we said, let's put a ramp on it. And let's go back and put flashy blinky lights on it. And let's work on some cool roles. And, you know, things like Space Mission had done well years past. Add speech again. Now, at that point in time, we didn't have our CVSD board, which is like a $400 option. and I think we had a cheaper version of Speed or something, a more rhythmic-made version of it. And basically, Larry and I went to my girl and said, if you've got to bet on the company and bet on a reopening, you can't bet on Sorcerer, you've got to bet on Space Shuttle. And we eventually convinced him to do that, and we put the little molded Space Shuttle. And that actually came out quite by accident. Mark Sprenger was having a hard time on the back glass. It was his first art package to this time, and he couldn't seem to draw the Space Shuttle tail without making it look like it was laying down. So we went and bought a model at lunch, Toys R Us, and brought it into Barry's office. And he had the play field drawing. It was on vellum, of course, at the time. And I just kind of said, here, like, here it is. Go draw this damn thing. And I put it right on where the ramp was. And everyone was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And next thing you know, Barry's got an X-Acto knife and it's cutting the thing apart. And it's sitting on the whitewood about an hour later. And it never left. So not exactly brilliant inspiration, but it sort of worked. And it ended up being a nice hide for the switch on the thing. And then Larry and I worked the rules over day in, day out, every night until like 3 in the morning. The reason it's still 3 in the morning is we go to the Cubs game every day at 1, and then we work it when it's quiet until about 3, but came up with some pretty cool rules, and two-ball, multiball, and three-ball, multiball, and the random feature, and, you know, unlimited jackpot shots by shooting the ramp in the middle. We got so many orders at the trade show that they reopened the company. So I like the space shuttle, Save Williams. I can save them at least once amongst a few other companies. Would you say that this was one of the first licensed games? Or, you know, it certainly seems like after the point they took off. Yeah, I mean, at that point in time, you know, Valley under Tom Neiman had done, like, Tommy and Dolly Parton and The Who and, you know, a couple other, you know, the Space Invaders was sort of a ripoff of the Geiger, you know, of the Aliens kind of look. But for Williams at the time, it was sort of like, you know, We called NASA. We got their permission. We, of course, did some really cheesy stuff. If anyone ever really looked at the back glass there a Williams logo on the space shuttle and a little A with a lightning bolt which was the Manhattan Project logo We had weapons on our space shuttle and it was Space Shuttle Defender for obvious reasons And then Mark Sprenger, I read a book called The Clampate Plate Orgy. I think it was Brian Wilson Keyes when I was in college, like in the late 70s. So if you look really closely, the word sex is airbrushed all through the cloud like 100 times. Wow. Is that something you've ever talked about before? Not really, but if you go back and look at it, you'll see sex. I make that a hundred times. The word sex is all through the planet. That's amazing. I really liked it. But then, of course, license stuff kind of happened. And then when we started Data East, Laser War was actually supposed to be laser tag. We were supposed to get the license for it, and it fell through at the last minute. Torpedo Alley was just stupid. Phantom of the Opera sort of traded on the show at the time and gasped in LaRue's book. But then we kind of went, you know, full hog with stuff like Robocop and other things. And, you know, it's sort of, you know, even if you look at the business today, people have tried beer themes and other themes. But, you know, at the end of the day, the stuff of brands are the things that sell the most because people can put them in their, they have an affinity for it. You know, if you're going to buy a mouse doll, most people buy a Mickey Mouse doll. and there's an affinity for these things and they have greater value and greater resale value. I mean, we made 11,000 Star Wars and 11,000 Lethal Weapons. You don't see those games, hardly ever, for sale. That's right. If you do, you get top price. Same thing with, you know, you never see a Tommy, you never see a Tales of the Crypt. I mean, a lot of that stuff, you don't see a Rocky, you don't see the original Batman. I wish I had a couple of the games I gave away to friends back these days, but, I mean, even if you look at what It was Supreme last year. I mean, they were selling $25,000 pinballs to everybody. All 100 of them. Or greater, I think one went for $75,000. I brought up Batman earlier in the show. If you come back and listen to this, I just picked up my dad at East Batman. I just had it restored. My daughter's a huge Batman fan. The Michael Eden one? Yes. It's a beautiful, beautiful game. It was really fun. The Joker feature was fun. The ramp was good. Kim Basinger loved her game. Loved her game. We got a lovely note from her. Well, I was going to ask you more about that. It's such a great game. If you can even find one now, they're so beat to hell because they've been just played and played and played. So mine's been completely restored, and I'm really looking forward to showing it to you. Hopefully you get to come to the Texas Pinball Festival. But what I was going to ask you was, I was going to ask you about Mad Magazine. And the reason I'm asking you is, and I have a bone to pick with you, by the way. Oh, great. Well, it was nice talking to you, Joe. It's not bad. So I collected at East design team patches. And so I have all of them. I'm only missing a couple of them. And at this past Chicago Expo, there was one for auction at the charity auction. And I was so excited. I went over there, and I put my bid, and I came back around later, and you had, like, way outbid me. And I was so, like, disappointed. It's good to be the king. Not the patch. I outbid on the jacket. Right. That's what I mean. I mean, you bid on the jacket, but it had all the patches on it, so I was going to, you know. But anyway, it was for a good cause, and there's no way I would have won it for it. I was willing to bid on it. I gave it to my youngest daughter. Oh, nice. She's very lucky. But one of the patches that I do have that people ask me about is Mad Magazine, and it was never produced, but you were obviously, it was your concept and your design. But, you know, there's a couple of pictures on the Internet with it. But what happened to that? Because I think that would be a great thing for a pinball machine today, especially for people in our age bracket or at least how old. Well, you know, there are a couple of things. First of all, it had no music and it really had no speech, even though there were a couple of mad songs over the years. And the game sort of was a little bit of a play on the talking head stuff. It kind of had a Rudy-esque character that crossed his eyes and did other weird shit. But Gary and I had the license. The guys from Mad Magazine loved it. Bill Gaines we met with. Everybody wanted to do it, but, you know, the business was really getting a little tenuous at the time. We were about to go make that game. We did a first, Kurt Andersen did the original art on it, then Marcus went back and did the final back last. And Gary's just afraid that he didn't have a market for the product in Europe. And at that point in time, Europe was probably 50% of our business or more. And he just got a cold beat and said, you know, we just can't take the risk. I guess that makes sense. If there's no sound or anything, I guess you'd have to come up with, What does a Mad Magazine pinball machine sound like, and what do the characters sound like? Yeah, there's a problem with calling the distributors and going, well, will you buy this game? And when they go, no, you go, okay, we have a problem. We can't make a product for Marketplace right now. What was your favorite Data East game that you were involved with, or Sega? Boy, that's like asking who's your favorite kit, I think. No, you've got a favorite. I ask all the designers this. Steve Ritchie, he'll tell you what his absolute favorite is. Well, first he'll tell you whatever the current game is, and then he'll tell you. Different games meant different things at different times. You know, obviously, Laser War was our first game. It put us in business, and it was innately a nice game. You know, it was a little blackout-like. You know, get the tree collars, get in the holes, get in your multiball, shoot the ramp, shoot the iron cannon. You know, the end of the opera sort of got us our first big win. That's a good one. That's where the company got profitable for the first time. You know, obviously, Jurassic Park and Star Wars, we sold so many of them. They're great games. 13-ball multiball was a hoot on Apollo 13. 2013. I said, real players game? I loved, loved, and I really enjoyed playing Starship Troopers, which was just the, you know, a real grow hair on the back of your neck kind of game. But my favorite all-time game that I made ever is South Park. Nice. Really? South Park? Yeah, that's a great game. I got a South Park. So what made that so special to you? Well, first off, nobody wanted to do the brand. I mean, we were so far ahead. I mean, we literally got that brand, like, when they were doing Spirit of Christmas right as it first happened. So we were like, the second brand. Obviously, Simpsons was very special, too, because we had that like we were the second licensed or ever. But Gary and I got into a huge, huge, gigantic, drag-out, knock-down, name-calling fight making South Park. Because of the poo. Because of the poo. He said, we will never play this game. And actually, before we had Mr. Hankey, we had like a Baby Ruth bar going up and down. And, you know, he like all of a sudden had this very indignant, you can't do that, the pinball, and we eventually wore him down with the hidey-ho thing. Hidey-ho! It was just a fun-playing game. I laughed a lot. You know, the bonus modes were good, the shots were good. I also liked the Neiman Marcus, or the second version of Star Wars, with the cannon, and the ramp was just a sweet ramp. There have been a lot of games over the years, but I really, you know, South Park, I kind of, one of those games I kind of still go back to, and I really get a couple of chuckles was out of. Baywatch was a really cool game too. I mean, that game was loaded. It had a lot of neat stuff and a lot of interesting places the ball would go. But Starship Troopers from an adrenaline, you know, we'll call it a Steve Ritchie adrenaline type product, that game rocked. And again, when I go back and I look at the first Star Wars, that great ramp shot and the up-down cannon and the bouncing RGD too. I mean, I worked on that game and it was a great game. But even stupid stuff like the glow balls on Viper when they're black, black light. Guns N' Roses was a fun experience. And if you don't know this, when you buy an extra ball, there's a song called Ain't Going Down No More, which Flash and Guns N' Roses never released. The only play that you could ever hear it is there on that game. Oh, wow. We've done a lot of neat stuff over the years. So, I mean, to that point, you've licensed a ton of major brands, and some of them have kind of come back full circle and are being remade now. Like Star Wars and Jurassic Park and Guns N' Roses is a rumored game that's coming out soon. So how do you think the licensing approval for that stuff has changed? Do you think it has at all? Well, it's gotten harder. It's gotten more expensive. You know, Guns N' Roses may be okay if Slash is involved. I mean, I love the first game we did, you know, with the G and the R on the ramp. And, of course, you know, technology of making pinballs and making specialty parts are a lot more sophisticated today than they were. You can make stuff look really good really cheaply today. I mean, it was really hard making a snake shooter back then. But, you know, part of it is some of these games, you can't find the Guns N' Roses anymore. Or, you know, the new Jurassic Park, Gary does. I mean, that game is, I mean, our first dinosaur, that was so hard to make, a ball-eating dinosaur. I mean, I think we even did that in a turn and looked and followed the ball and did all that crazy stuff it did. And the new one they did is just a marvel. I mean, it's a brilliantly done piece of work. But, you know, what's funny is, you know, now watching all the other manufacturers really gravitate back to licenses, right? We hear that Chicago's got one coming with maybe a **** or something. And, you know, you see Rick and Morty being done by our friends up at Spooky. You know, Gary, you know, had some success for Black Knight, but I'm pretty sure that game would have probably sold more if it was a better brand. And it seemed to do it differently because it was a good play field. It just didn't curb appeal unless you're an all-shirt collector and maybe you've got the other two Black Knights and you want that to be your third. But, you know, Munsters had curb appeal. Stranger Things has curb appeal. Elvira, you know, finally doing it again and now having real video and better speech. And that's kind of fun when you see her on the screen. I mean, when you were in Data East, I mean, you started to do a lot of licensed stuff, and there was a merger around that same time between Bally and Midway and Williams to become WMS. Looking at that list, I mean, they didn't seem to really delve heavily into the licensed themes until around the early 90s. And do you think that Data East kind of pushed them into that? Of course. We were gaining market share, and we were buying brand. And look, as an operator, years ago, how the business worked, operator bought a game, put it on the route. He made money on the game. Six months later, he'd trade it in or sell it around Christmas time and go buy his next new game. Certainly, you know, Lethal Weapon or Star Wars or Tales from the Crypt or Hook had much more curb appeal in the resale market than, you know, Cactus, whatever you want to call it, right? I mean, that had curb appeal. Now, not to say that Midway didn't do well with Attack from Mars, which basically was a ripoff of Mars Attacks or Medieval Mandus, short of a play on Monty Python, right? They probably would have sold a lot more of his Monty Python. But, you know, obviously the strategy of going with uniquely branded products, they went out of business, okay? Call it what you want. You know, they did Star Wars and they did the Attack from Mars 2000. Bally Midway, you know, first off, they built a cabinet that was so heavy with that monitor that an operator couldn't even move it, right? You know, you guys know what operators are. They take a game, they strap it to a dolly. One guy goes out with a truck, moves the game. As soon as you've got to put two guys on a hand dolly, that changes the labor requirements, right? Right. From one guy to two, it gets more expensive. But even looking at, like, American Pinball, I hear there's rumors they're doing Hot Wheels, right? Because, you know, six people bought Beer Fest, and all the moms said, I don't want an alcohol game in my basement, right? So I played okay, A for effort, but nobody wanted that. Nobody's going to buy that. Are you familiar with Cosmic Carnival? Whose game is that? And now defunct company Suncoast. Suncoast, yeah. Yeah, they came out with a pinball game. They had Dirty Donnie do the artwork. I don't know how much that cost, but they put some money into this game. They brought it to TPF or one of the expos, listened to fan feedback, changed the game, delivered maybe 13 games, and they're gone. likeable game and congratulations and it takes millions of dollars it's like the deep root guy he may have developed a hardware system or bought some of these hardware system or there's one thing about building one pinball or 10 or even 20 there's another thing about building a thousand the parts of labor the parts are there okay and it's four thousand dollars to build a game number out of my ass four million bucks to build a thousand right you gotta do all them and finance them, right? The question would be, would you recommend to a startup company to wait until they have the money to invest in a license, or would you stay one brand, period? Right. It's just part of your cost of doing business. You have a better chance of getting in the market. I mean, look at Spooky. He sold out of his entire, you know, 750 Rick and Mortys, right? He'll be busy the next 18 months. Whether the game's great or not, great. I haven't played it. I haven't seen it, but there's a Rick and Morty fan that may want to put that next to their South Park or next to their Simpsons. There's a place in the market for that product, right? You know, Atomic Generator 3, probably not. No, smart move. I, Charlie, I'll tip my hat to it. We did well. Yeah. So one more data use question from my end. So when data use was bought out by Sega, you stayed on as the executive VP of game design. Yeah. And later, Gary Stern bought Sega and started Stern Pinball. And then at what point did you transition away from the company and pinball in general? And then I know you moved kind of into the slot machine world. Why did you make that transition? Well, around the time that happened, it was around 99. I had been approached by a couple of slot machine companies as early as 98 because the slot business was starting to become branded. Williams had done Monopoly. They were moving more towards video. A lot of the slot companies didn't have that skill set of bokeh lights and choreographed sound and music. At the time that Gary had Sega, when Sega had the company, Gary was looking to try and buy the company back from Sega at that time. They were kind of losing interest. Saturn had failed or whatever. It was the, not Saturn, maybe Saturn, but whatever the game system du jour the day was, had not succeeded. Right. And we looked at the business of what our salaries were collectively, and we just got to a point where the company could not afford either of us. I mean, it could be him or it could be me, but it couldn't be both. And I was able to find a position in the gaming world. And even though I left Cary, you know, a lot of his very early products, like Harley Davidson or Austin Powers, I still helped him get the brands, helped him get the licensing. As a matter of fact, the cabinet and the back glass for Austin Powers were done by one of my artists, Romy Vasquez, who's since retired. when I worked at the IGT. We were doing an Austin Power slot machine, and I got him some side work so he could buy a guitar, and he did the artwork for Gary on that game. So, you know, I like to say I have left stern pinball, but I've never left stern pinball. You know, Gary and I started that company in his base, Bustelli, in 1986, and I'm immensely proud of what the company's become, and that, you know, 35 years later, we've out-survived Bill Pollack and Alvin Gee and Pally and Williams and a half dozen others, Calcom. And we've had staying power, and pinball probably wouldn't be where it is today or survive the really cataclysmic downtime that Gary and I have soldiered through. And trust me, he has some really hard times. A guy I give great credit to who works with Gary, not only is his partner Dave, because Dave has really added a great discipline for Gary's business that he didn't have before. He ended up being a great partner for Gary. But Jerry's hiring George Gomez. George has done a phenomenal job re-engineering literally every part that was there, from the flippers to the backbox to the legs to the casters. I mean, I buy a new game every year or so, and I open it up, and I just marvel at all the improvements they continue to make and the simplicity of the board and the wire and all this other stuff. And man, George Gomez. Joe, your name's featured in a lot of games, whether it's as designer or as co-designer. I was wondering, as far as designing a game goes, what do you believe the extent of your ability is? Like, where would you rate yourself, like, from David Hankin sketch master to captain CAD artist? Like, where do you fall in that line? Well, you know, Chris, I'm kind of multi-disciplinary in what I can do. Certainly, you know, I learned to draw with compasses and French curves and vellum years ago when we started. You know, literally laser war I drew on Thanksgiving Day Literally one day On Thanksgiving Day 1986 We showed the game in April of 87 We had the ramp two days later It was on the ball shooter Make it have a little more stuff But I had the ability to do both But in later years I worked with Ed Tabula Or Joe Balcer and others We started with an afghan drawing They'd take a shot at it We'd throw the French curves down We'd roll balls around on the table we'd build a whitewood, we'd see what we liked, or we'd get what we could afford. Certainly from a rules standpoint at some times, I've become very involved. Like, you know, when we did the Beatles game, I was very involved with some of the rule changes or adding the spinner or adding the magnet to the top to stop the orbit from going. But, you know, I haven't really, you know, I've been making saw machines the past 22 years and really been concentrating on a different industry. On the back end of the day at Data East, we were small. I mean, there are 11 of us making four pinball machines a year. everybody did a lot of everything. And, you know, as the senior guy back there where the buck stopped, there wasn't a game that I didn't get involved with, and I'm sure I fucked up a couple along the way. But we all look at everything we do now and go, gosh, why didn't we put that bank flipper on King Kong? But it didn't look like a good idea at the time. But, you know, it was where you were in the market, responding to market trends, and where the customer was. I think pinball got really complex and confusing. I see it's pulling back to be a little more reasonable today in, you know, making sure the game has a reasonable backbone of good rules before you add all the schmaltz on top of it for the... I get really concerned about the influence of the ultra-loud person. I mean, it was an interesting thing. We did the Beatles, you know, for months and months and years, we've heard about, hey, go back and do the Spirit Archives, and, man, what I wouldn't do to have a sea witch or, oh, gosh, They don't even do Galaxy or Meteor or Orbiter One. Orbiter One. We wanted one that was really classic, right? And we finally decided for the Beatles to try and make this thing kind of a retro snapshot of the 60s, but still have cleaned up all the shots that didn't work and the orbits that didn't work and added magnets and spinners and deeper rolls and more. But to try and build the backbone of something that if you could have built a Beatles game in the late 60s, what would it have been like with modern technology? And everybody, before they even played it, you know, I thought they were going to come to Vegas and burn my house down in piss and moan and complain. And I play this game, and my friends play it, and they love it. I mean, it's fun. It sounds great. It looks good. It's challenging. It's understandable. You cannot count targets. But, you know, everybody seems to always ask for whatever. They aren't getting served at that time. I need to be in the restaurant business. I was really hoping for turkey, but I ordered meatloaf. So, you know, I think the very few have become too loud for the, they have forgotten the simplicity of a firepower or a blackout or a flash or a high speed of, you know, get the red, the green light, the yellow light, the red light and get away. What more challenging game ever was than getting that queued up and having to make that side shot. So I think, you know, I think Gary's done a good job kind of bringing it back to where it needs to be to make challenging, fun games that we can understand again. I think we tried to do that with Beatles and with the most recent Batman. So that's my thought for you. I mean, you touched on this a little bit, but there was a little bit of, you know, a lot of bit of controversy about the Beatles in terms of the pricing. Do you feel like a lot of the naysayers might have just been, you know, upset that they might not be able to own this game? I've heard a lot of people say, I would love this game. It's really expensive. Yeah. I mean, the license thing is to go get the Beatles and Beatles songs and deal with both Sony and Universal Publishing. I mean, guys, you know, it's seven figures. Right. It's the most expensive license that has ever been on a pinball, I believe, ever, by a serious factor. I don't think anybody... Harry Potter might prove to be more. You're poking a bear there because a lot of people really want to know that. And, Joe, that was, like, the number one question that people told me they wanted me to ask you was... We'll get to that. We'll get to that. All right. We're jumping on more than that. He said the word, man. He said it. We'll get to it. All right, all right. Yeah, I think one thing that people don't realize when everyone was bitching about the license and how much it costs and all that was the publishing, the music publishing, which is over and above what the license costs. That's a whole different negotiation. And I don't think anybody considered that. And if you want to talk about getting the rights to use music from two songwriters and what would probably be the most expensive, I think Lennon and McCartney might be right up towards the top somewhere. I mean, we had a problem at the end. There was a game that wasn't originally in the game, which was Taxman. And at the 12th hour, just as the game was getting ready to go in, George Harrison's widow said, there's not a song in there that George wrote. We had to go pay for the song to add it to make her happy and get final approval. Oh, I didn't even know that. Yeah. Now you know the rest of the story. Now you know the rest of the story. We're happy it's in there, but, you know, go back and get your checkbook out and go, So, you know, ouch, thank you, may I have another? But that's how that ended up in there. I mean, that was a 12-hour ad to the product. But it took 10 years to finally get the Beatles to even consider making it, let alone approving it. And the fact that we finally got to the point where they approved it and it wasn't just, you know, for years everybody offered Yellow Submarine, to go back and do quintessential 1960s Ed Sullivan show Beatles in multiple versions, And that was, guys, it took me a decade to get that. It was a decade of every year trying again. A decade of every year sending a Christmas card. Hey, here's what we can do. We did, and we got it done. And the fact that we got it done, let me tell you, I have a lot of people that I know that have the product, and they love it. You know, anybody who wants to put their big boy pants on and get in the pinball business, go after the big licenses. You better have some cash that you can afford to lose and also have the fortitude to do it. I can't tell you how many people have contacted me since that game came out, and they were the people who were bitching about how much it costs and all that, and they finally played it, and they're like, I can't get off this machine. Like, they eventually bought one. They talk about how much they love playing it and all that. Everyone just opens their mouth and flaps about it, but when they play it, it's a whole different game. Yeah. Yeah, the gameplay's great. You know, we did a lot of release more things with the roles. You know, it's easy to understand it's challenging, it's hard, but there's also parts that are easy and satisfying and feel good and you feel good when you make a loop on a loop on a loop. It was a great play field to start with, like Koopman did, and George and I kind of refreshed it and added stuff to it, and I'm proud of it. If you can't afford it, get a better job. I don't know what to say. Was the complete run of those games manufactured or was only part of it? No, we had a three-year sell-off, three-year period, so we did not want to overflood the market. Gary puts a lot of new products in the market, but they chug along, but I would say probably 80%, 85% of them are already sold in the hands of people that enjoy it, so there's not going to be more to go. You've mentioned that the Beatles was something that you'd always wanted to bring to pinball. You went after the license for 10 years. You can't obviously go into details, but after years of creating all these games with licenses that you've gone after, are there still the whales out there that you're trying to get a hold of? How many licenses do you think are still on your dream theme list, or have you made them all? Oh, no, no. I've probably got about three or four that I haven't made that are on the Capow future production list. All right. You know, one's actively wrapping up right now. Potter, we talked about that. Everybody wants it. Everybody says no about it. But, you know, currently with Zynga, we're building a beautiful Harry Potter product that I've been part of since day one and it's been publicly announced. and, you know, at some point next year or this year you'll get a chance to play it. And, you know, that builds a relationship on the brand and builds trust, and you springboard off those things. So that's amazing. It's really exciting to hear because there are so many people out there who want that game and would love to see that happen. And I know that the issue has been just misconception, at least the rumor is, on J.K. Rowling's part about what pinball is and what it could be. There's a big orbit of people around that brand, from Warner Brothers licensing to Warner Brothers franchise to Warner Brothers theme parks. We even get to J.K. Rowling's, okay? There's, you know, it's like Star Castle. There's just all these things going around in circles, and you've got to figure out how to get through the walls and get to the center. How many lifts does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? So we're just taking our time, and never say never. Some things take time. Some things come easy. Some things might be very expensive. Do you think Beatles is expensive? Harry Potter might be really expensive. Or some other things that we're looking at. I mean, what do you think are the golden brands that people are so itching for? Well, it's interesting because, you know, if I walk through a casino, I see a lot of brands that are already pinball machines that I would consider really exciting licenses, and then others that are in the casino world that aren't actually in the pinball world but are really heavily requested. The Goonies, for instance. So I played a Goonies slot machine the other day, and people would love to see that as a pinball machine. And that's never happened. Go play Stranger Things. It's Goonies, more modern. Right, right. It doesn't have the nostalgia factor, though, that the Goonies does. I know that the head-to-head guys had asked you about Goonies, and you didn't think that would ever happen. But, yeah, that's not real. It's okay. I found the 80s stuff doesn't do that well on the casino side. They're not doing that great. I don't know if that player hasn't yet gotten their kids off to school or whatever it is. They don't have the free cash. It doesn't, you know, Flash and Scooney's other 80s themes, Vacation, just don't seem to get across the line in the casino side. So, we'll see. Well, like Willy Wonka, for instance, was a dream theme that just came out this year. That's all over the casinos. I mean, that's something that, I guess, the casino world picked up on very quickly. and, you know, people are... It just doesn't look like Pat's pinball's setting the world on fire from like a dog. Maybe it's just, you know, just kind of okay. Yeah, it's gotten a fair share of criticism, but it's, you know, I'm staring at my Ellie right now. It's definitely a theme that I love. I love the game, but... It's special to you where you can put it in your basement or have your family and friends come over and it's kind of love-threatening. Yeah, that's right. I certainly know a couple years ago, you guys probably remember I did a poll of what were some of the popular themes people wanted. And, you know, when Wanka came back very high, we tried to get it. We didn't. We did other things instead. I know a lot of people that ask for a horror theme. They'll mention, like, maybe Halloween or, like, the hit. Yeah. You know, I think Killed in Nightmare on Elm Street years ago, you know, class of 1812 was kind of an Addams Family-ish. I mean, Munsters is kind of there. Elvira is kind of there. I think straight out scary stuff, Mama's not putting in the basement. That's right. That's why we could never put a Walking Dead. Right. Stranger Things kind of gets you there. It's kind of horror, but it's kind of kitschy. Yeah. I got one for you. What? Now, it's a music pin, but it crosses several genres, and it was actually doable now that the guy is dead, Prince. Oh, gross. You never would have done it. Gross. I just don't want to do anything with Michael Jackson or Prince or anybody that died of barbiturates or drug overdoses. It's just not interesting to me. Well, that's unfortunate, but... I'd take Prince over the Michael Jackson situation, though. Yeah, I mean, maybe we should go do Glee. That'd be fun. Are you cracking wise? I mean, you've done, you've currently been in the kind of online, outside of your casino work, you're also doing the Zynga app work. Have you ever thought about doing a pinball app, or is that something that you don't think there's a... Other guys are making good stuff right now between Zen and Far State. They're good. There's lots of nice versions of some of their, you know, some of the games kind of blow. A couple of them play really well. So, that's, it's too, you know, for my world, it's too small, it's too small fry for me. Right. What I'm making. Right. You know, I make really big mass market stuff, whether it be on the casino side or social game side. I mean, Hit of Rich has been played by a billion people. Okay. Billion. Big B. Billion. You know, it's got, I don't know, you know, 190 million. downloads or something. It's a crazy thing this year. I don't know. Big numbers. So that kind of goes to the point where, I mean, Pinball for you is more of a passion project, right? I mean, you're not doing this to make money. It seems to me like it's more of just something you enjoy doing. It's just a chance for Gary and I to continue our deep friendship and stay more connected. That's it. That's the only reason. How deep do your plans extend with Kapow How far out Well my wife her plan is for me never to make another pinball ever She thinks a lot of my time effort and energy when I should be doing things that get me closer to retirement or don't put funds at risk. You know, he don't certainly put a lot of funds at risk. But, you know, for me, I'm not going to say it's sort of not a full-time business. It's barely a business. but it's kind of fun just to be able to, you know, in Gary's Twilight years for us to be able to still be, have that Harry and Sam relationship that we have and be able to come in and see the guys and, you know, make a game. You know, I'm not going to be as good as Brian and Eddie or as the kid that made Jurassic Park or whoever, the King Steve Ritchie. My stuff has a different, you know, I have my own fans. I like my games because they were fun. You know, they didn't take themselves too seriously and the shots weren't too tight and the layman could really have a good time against the multiball. And there was fun stuff in them. I mean, Leave a Weapon was a really great game. On Batman, I was wondering, because Batman is kind of like a partial rescan. I mean, there was some stuff that was, it's kind of like the Beatles, you know, you started with something and changed it. Was that done because of Adam West's failing health and you wanted to hurry and get the game to market? Or was it just a choice much like the Beatles where it's like, let's take, you know, something... Well, I kind of like that game. I think realizing there were a couple things we could have done differently, I came in and, you know, we talked about adding some ramps and we came up with a gadget for the corner. You know, they didn't sell that many of that other game, so it really wasn't that widely distributed. I mean, they did okay, but it wasn't, you know, bent to house the games or anything. Yeah. But it seemed to be a pretty good jumping off point for us. We didn't know Adam was sick until he died. Oh. He came into that trade show and he saw the game and did the speech and saw all that stuff. We had no idea Adam was ill. Nobody told us. I had the pleasure of meeting Adam West via April before he died, right after I got my Batman 66. And my daughter and I got to go meet him and Burt Ward and got him to sign my Translight. So that's very special to us. And we got some cool pictures. And I'm so fortunate that he passed away, but I feel lucky that we were able to meet him just before that. Well, I knew Adam for, you know, many years because of my Batmobile, and I kind of introduced him and his agent, Fred Wasbrook, you know, 15 years ago. And then we did the slot machine at RiskScrap that was very successful, and also the products we did at Zynga with him. So, you know, it was a bummer. I thought the game was really meant to be a great game. What I mean was it took a little while to get the software together, and actually at one point in time, the bat device in the back was going to kind of work like a space shuttle where we were actually going to keep three balls up there and let four or five balls in the trough. It was actually going to be an eight-ball multiball, but it never got programmed that way. So if you didn't know that, that's a little trivia piece. I'm going to call Lyman right now. So this is kind of a random, miscellaneous question, but you seem like the perfect guy to ask because you've been involved in the older, you know, the data use days and currently with Kapow. There's been some discussion about some playfield issues lately that I'm sure you've heard about with, like, clear-coat pitting and pooling and issues with, you know, cracking with the playfields. Do you know if there's any issue or why that's happening, why it didn't happen in the older games? Well, it always happened. Say, to quote Sergeant Schultz, I know nothing. I know nothing. Nothing. You know, I don't pay attention to that stuff at all. Okay. You know, if a flipper is strong and a ball hits a post, it's going to go airborne. It's a piece of wood. It's going to hit it. The clear coat is not glass. It's paint. It'll get a tip. It's a ball. It's a piece of wood. It'll roll. Big deal. Right. You know, everybody thinks your game is going to be pristine forever. Buy it. Put a shroud on it. Don't play it. You know, light candles around it. It's a pinball. They wear out. They're mechanical things. So you haven't noticed a change from before to now in terms of the play field quality? I'm sure from batch to batch, the poplar wood changes from what tree was cut down or what the amount of moisture was in the air or the amount of time the hard coat did or how somebody mixed the hard coat with not enough of something and too much of something else. But, you know, it's a pinball machine. To quote Gary, we're not making hard lung machines. We're making pinball machines. Fair enough. We used to make games in the hard code that would wear out in about 90 days, and within a year the paint was stripping off the bottom and would break. Let me tell you, when we made pinball machines, before we made the solid-state flipper, you know, we had the big pinball war. We had series-wound coils. Okay, Electrical Engineering 101. And then somehow they got a parallel-wound coil, right, thing on it at Williams. And then we did a parallel-wound coil. And we got sued for it. I mean, everybody uses parallel round coils, but that's when we made the solid state flipper the first time that Kurt, whatever his name was, designed for us. Well, you know, that changed everything because when a, you know, how we used to make money in the business, a coil stop would break, right? Or a blade would get stuck or a fake light would wear out or eventually the plastic piece in the super would wear out. You get 50 volts in the coil, the coil would melt, right? Burn to the ground. Then we sold apart. Right. You know, with the Ty Fasey flipper, remember the Ty Fasey? No. The first solid-state flipper. I don't remember what it was. It was T-Y-F-A-S-S-A-I. Everybody thought it was the name of the Indian engineer that developed it. And we put it, it was actually in our literature. It was like Ty Fasey 2006 flipper, the new invention that's going to change the world. Do you know what Ty Fasey's did work? And this will be how I wrap up the day. No. No, it's got to be good. take your fucking flipper and shove it. Is that true? It's true. Yeah. That's great. Well, I'm going to ask you one last question just to wrap things up. We've had recently some, I guess for lack of a better term, pinball media people sort of drop off the grid, and some of them have cited the reasons being that the hobby is too negative these days, obviously with the Internet and everybody thinking that their opinion matters and, you know, let's get into an insult match and who can come up with the funniest insult. Does the current temperature of the hobby discourage you at all? No, I think the hobby is great. It's really fun to see people making all kinds of crazy parts and art blades and all these other things. Do you want me to translate? Yeah, if you're talking about the guys that are sitting home and bitching about the play field on a particular game or a shot they don't like or, you know, check your stocks right. You know, my suggestion is if you think you can do better, prove me wrong. Go out and do it. Go become a pinball designer. Show me how brilliant you are. I mean, a couple guys have done that. The kid that built Jurassic Park proved to be a great little pinball designer. I mean, his games really impressed me. I really, really like him. The kid that did Atomic Meltdown or whatever it's called. It was a fun game. It wasn't fancy. I would have done some things in the software that could have made the game a little more fun or have a ball up top. But all in all, wow, fresh, nice, fun. For those that sit home in their underwear and their white beaters and drink a PBR and bitch, the word to William Schneider, get a life. When you can't afford a Beatles game, if you see one in a bar, put a buck in it and thank the operator for buying it, okay? I have a longstanding joke with my grandson. We are in Kentucky and we go to Waffle House for breakfast. Always give him a $5 bill and tell him to go feed the jukebox because I want that jukebox there next time. Okay? You know, he plays a bunch of Waffle House songs, Daddy Married Mama under the Waffle House banner or whatever, stuff like that. But if you guys see a pinball on location, put a buck in it, please. Fair enough. All right, Joe. Well, we appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much, Joe. That was great. Thanks, Joe. You're welcome, guys. and Chris, I'll talk to you about Doc Brown and our pinball project later. Oops, did I say something I shouldn't have? Oh, no. I don't know what you have. Oh, we got a bad connection. That's awesome. Hey, you can edit this out, dude, but are you guys making Back to the Future? Oh, Jesus. Here's a bad connection. You got to leave that in now. He dropped it. He did, and dude, he also spoiled. You got to bleep that. Holy shit. Nobody knows that. When he gets to that, you've got to go beep. You've got to put a little hint right there. No, Chris, this is something I haven't heard of. And if he did say he's wrapping up a game right now, and you haven't told a shit about any Kapow titles you're working on, so if it's back to the future, that is awesome. Well, that was Mr. Joe Kamiko. He certainly knows how to make an exit, leaving us hanging with those final words. Boys, what did you think? That interview was phenomenal. There were so many things that he dropped there, some of which we may have to bleep out because I don't know if they're common knowledge or allowed to be discussed. I'm really glad we got to talk to him. I'd never talked to Joe before, so that was very exciting. He did drop a lot of little nuggets there and some good information. Yeah. I'm still pissed about the jacket. Next time I'm over his house, I'll peel off the one you want and bring it back to him. I can't believe, actually, did you guys know that Mad Magazine was a game that was being made as a prototype? I didn't know that. I knew it when I got the patch. I found the patch years ago. Gene Cunningham from Illinois Pinball, he had a box of junk at one of his sales during Expo, and I was digging through it, and I found that Mad Magazine design patch, and he gave it to me. And so I immediately started looking at it, and that's when I learned that it was a game that never went into production, but that he was supposed to make it. Is it like a whitewood, or is it like a – I'm trying to remember. It's on the Internet Pinball database. There's a picture of the patch, too. Yeah, and there's a sketch. There's like some sort of a drawing. I think it's just a line drawing, a pencil drawing of the artwork for the play field. Yeah, but it's got the back glass and, you know, some of the artwork for it anyway. Yeah, the back glass is great. It looks just like a Mag Magazine cover. Oh, man. That was really cool. Super awesome of Joe to take his time to talk to us. Very busy guy, but we really appreciate it, and really appreciate him being so personal, candid, and answering all those questions. So thank you, Joe. Joe was awesome. That was a great interview. I really appreciate it. I know he's a really busy guy, so it was cool of him to take the time to talk to us and answer all those questions. Absolutely. Thanks, Joe. And now it's on to our Barlow's Pinpet Shelter Drive. We can now announce all of the prizes for this fine, fine cause. What a selection of prizes it is, man. You just kept coming. You kept texting us every time you got a new prize, and it was just like every day. There was something new that was added, and all of it is awesome. I'm coming at you with more prizes. That's right. Yeah, okay, so here is the rundown. Number one, you get one sheet of anti-glare professional pinball voodoo glass, compliments of Coin Taker. They will ship it right to your house, so you don't got to pick it up. You don't got to screw around. Nothing. Number two, from Chicago Gaming, a Monster Bash remake play field to hang on your wall in your game room or office or wherever you choose. Super awesome. All the inserts are in it. It's very cool. And last but not least, yes, this will be your chance to win a Jaws Translight. Nice. One of only 75. Sure to sell out because I'm feeling a little Zoltar myself right now. So anyway, those are the three big prizes. I don't know what more you want, but this is all you have to do to enter. Take whatever you can. Hopefully not cash or check. We prefer if it's like food, blankets, toys, whatever you can afford to your local shelter and just make a donation. It doesn't have to be any certain amount. Just whatever you can give is fine, and you're all equally entered into the contest. You don't get a better chance if you spend more. Of course, it's appreciated not only by myself but the puppies and the kitties and everything. So, yeah, hopefully you can do that in the next two weeks, two to three weeks, let's say, because on the next show, episode number five, we're going to pick the winner for that. So you've got at least two weeks to get your stuff out there and take care of some animals that could use your help because these animals offer unconditional love, and they have no one to give it to, so let's show them a little love. And I'm breaking up. Those are some awesome prizes, man. Yeah, those are. Those are great, man. Kudos. Hang on. Let me see. Oh, Christopher Franchi really is a big softie. Right? Oh, this is all getting cut out. No, dude. No, it's not. This should be right at the end. Christopher Franchi actually tears up talking about the puppies and the kitties. You're a good dude. I love animals. Okay, so please enter and please do what you can. And, yeah, yeah. Saw I got a little mushy. Whatever. Let's liven things up. Ed, we need the latest update for TPF. What's going on, buddy? I want some exclusives, Ed. I want some really good info here. First of all, if you haven't seen the new Rockin' TPF 2020, I'm going to call it a commercial video that Emoto did for us. It is awesome. You can see it at TexasPenball.com, on our Facebook page. It's on YouTube, but it's pretty awesome. So a lot of people have been having fun spotting themselves in the video because it's got a lot of content in it, and it moves pretty fast. So if you haven't checked that out, go check it out, and maybe you'll see yourself in there. Now, I thought I heard, like, I don't know, three or four years ago, that the guy who did all of those trailers for the movies, in a world where whatever. I thought he died. Yeah, but he got it back for this, which was great. He was hard to get, but we pulled it off. So we need to have a contest as if you can guess who the action hero voice is. we're going to give something away. I'm pretty sure it's obvious. No, it was great to see you. Actually, you know, to be honest, I did not, that was actually Emoto's suggestion that she asked, she said, you know, I think Chris Ferranti would be a good pick to do this. So she asked me if I could get you to do this. And I initially told her. Go ahead. Tell people how that went down, like what I said to you when you asked me, because that's what's really funny. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, when I initially asked you if you would do the voice work for our commercial, you specifically said, does it have in a world in it? And I laughed so hard because that's actually how it starts out. Yeah, like I'm only going to do it if I can start it with in a world. Exactly. That's exactly how it started out, and that was actually written into the script before we had that conversation. Yeah. It turned out really well. We're really happy with it. But as far as TPF News, we announced Eric Menear is coming, the designer for Pirates of the Caribbean from Jersey Jack Pinball. Yeah. We're having beers, Eric. Eric's a great dude. If you've never gone and talked to him personally, you should. He's just really down to earth and just a really nice guy. Why don't you sit at the bar after the show? Yes. Well, you know, his brother, Chris, runs Kingpin Games, and he's coming as well. Not as a celebrity, yes, but Chris brings a lot of cool games and stuff, and he'll have, I'm sure, the Jersey Jack Pinball goodies in his little area. But also we announced Jerry Sullenberg with Multimorphic. So Jerry's going to have a pretty awesome display. He always does. Jerry's been with TPF for, you know, gosh, since the beginning. I mean, I remember when he first started developing the P3 years ago, and it was just literally made out of cardboard. And, you know, he had styrofoam and stuff for the ramps. This was years and years ago, and we've just watched it get developed over the years. But he's got some cool stuff coming. So we announced that he was going to be there. Okay, hold on. So I'm on the brakes. Jerry, I want a tour of your game. When I'm there, I want you to show me all about this because I heard a lot about it. I heard a lot of people shit on it, and I heard a lot of people say that it was awesome. I don't know either way, so I want you to give me a tour of the game. I don't know how you could play this and not think it's awesome. It's a really cool, unique game, and if you're going to shit on it, maybe it's just not for you because it's so different than your average pinball machine. Well, it might be the people shitting on it that are the problem. I think the people that just openly don't like it or are so vocal, that probably never really played it. Exactly, and it's probably not something they'd ever buy, so, you know, who cares? But it's fun, man. Play Lexi Lightspeed. There's a couple of games you can sync up with multiple machines next to each other, like a car racing game that's awesome. And then there's a bunch of, like, mini games so you can play, like, a cannon blast game that was neat. So definitely a cool thing to look at, and hopefully we'll have some new stuff to show because everyone that I've heard talk about it has said that the only thing he's really missing is a big license to throw on there. So it would be cool to see something like that. Matchbox cars. There you go. See, that would be funny if that was Matchbox. So the other big announcement that we've done so far that's already on the Texas Pinball Festival website is, so we have a best-in-show competition. And one of the great things about TPF is the collectors bring some beautiful, gorgeous games. They spend weeks and months restoring them, getting them ready for TPF. They're really proud of getting those plaques and ribbons and stuff. But we also give away cash prizes with that. And they did this last year. But, again, for 2020, Deep Root is doubling the prize money for the exhibitors that bring the games and enter them into the best in show. So, like, the Grand Champion is going to walk away with $500. bucks and everybody else in every other category is going to walk away with $200. So we really appreciate that. And they also supplied the money for, we give away what we call a swag bag. So every exhibitor that brings a game to TPF gets a cool little bag. We're going to have more information on that later. We're still kind of putting the, you know, what's going to be inside it. It's kind of a big deal. We'll make a video of it. That's cool. Deep Root paid for all that as well. So we appreciate that. They've really, you know, stepped up their support of the show. So, I mean, from what I've heard, they're going to fly a lot of their customers down or at least put them up when they're down there and get them access to TPF and a VIP room at TPF. They're going to have a VIP room, but it's not going to be a party room, per se. I think the idea is someplace for deep-root customers to get away from the noise, and they're going to have water, and I think they might have like a little snack buffet in there of some kind. I haven't really worked all the details out with Robert yet, so we're still kind of putting together what they want. But, yes, they're going to have a separate VIP room upstairs for D-Boot customers and for them to – I think they might have one of the prototypes in there. That's cool. For people to come check out. Yeah, that's very cool. I just have one question for the people listening out there. How could you not go to TPF this year? That's right. Can you give us just a nibble of whether or not you know of any games that may be revealed? You know, just in a very generic, no companies necessarily, but do you think there's going to be any announcements of new games? Well, you know, American Pinball has already announced that they're going to unveil their next game at TPF. So we're all hoping, you know, I've talked to some other manufacturers, and the honest truth is a lot of them are, I think they're trying, but building pinball is hard. So I think they're all going to put their best foot forward. I know Multimorphic's got something cool coming we've talked about. And, you know, I think they're all going to put their best foot forward and try to make it at TPF. I don't know why you wouldn't. I mean, there's thousands of people from all over the world that are there, so why wouldn't you want to show them what's coming? But building pinball's hard. They're going to do their best. I think their intentions are. Now, as far as Deep Root goes, I truly don't know. I mean, and I don't, you know, he's supporting the show and he's paying for, you know, quite a bit. So I don't, I'm not going to pry too much. Other than Raza, I don't know what the plan is. And all of that's going to be unveiled, not even the TPF. I think they're going to unveil all that on the Wednesday before TPF down in San Antonio. I know a lot of the media type people are already making plans to drive to San Antonio and see what's what down there. And then they're going to bring the whole show to TPF on Thursday. Are you going to be there? Are you going to go? No. Oh, no? No. God, no. I'm so busy. Zero hour. Yeah, it's zero hour. I'll be driving a big truck myself full of merchandise and my own games and cash registers and displays and stuff on Wednesday. I'll be driving up to the embassy to unload our truck and start getting ready. How about you, Chris? Are you going to make it to the Deep Root reveal? The reveal? I was, oddly enough, not invited. I believe that because I was too flaky. Did you apply to go? Did you ask? They don't just invite you. You have to fill a little form online. Oh, no, I didn't. Okay, there you go. I'm not going to say I'm not interested in it. I can't go, but I would be interested in going, but I didn't know that I had to fill something out. You've got to apply online. I would love to go, but I know, Ed, if they're doing it, the Wednesday before TPF, it would just make sense that whatever they reveal there might show up at TPF. Oh, I don't doubt that. I'm sure that whatever they're doing, They're going to make a good presence at TPF. But I was just kind of, I mean, myself, selfishly, I wish I could have gone. I even tried to talk to Robert and say, why don't you do it like on the Monday before TPF so I could actually get down there. But they're going to do it on Wednesday, and I guess load everything up and make the Mad Dash to Dallas. But as far as the exclusive goes, every year those that know Martin Ayoub and Jonathan Jusin, Martin Ayoub of Pinball News and Jonathan Jusin of Pinball Magazine, they put together a fun trivia game that they usually open TPF up with in the happy hour area of the hotel, and they give away prizes and stuff. And this year, I hadn't really heard from them because I know they've got a lot going on, but they're going to, again, once again, I'm going to have them come, and they're going to do a neat little, so you think you know pinball, I believe, is the title, but they're going to do it on Saturday right before the Twippies at 6 p.m., but again, it's going to be in the bar area at the hotel. So they'll kind of get everybody warmed up for the Twippies, and there'll be nothing after that because the seminar room, we're going to clear it out this year. I guess they were really scrambling last year to get the Twippies up and going, so I'm going to give them some extra time in the seminar room to really get things set up and all that kind of stuff. But that's all I got right now. I still think we need a giant banner of the Twippie logo. Where? to hang in front of that wall full of Texas pinball logos. You shut your mouth, Christopher Franchi. Well, it can be there all weekend. It can be behind everybody's head that does a seminar all weekend. But for the Twippies, there should be a nice big banner of that kick-ass fucking logo I did. Negative. So actually, here we're... Screw you, Franchi. Screw you, Franchi. No, that was kind of a deal because they're live streaming the Twippies. And so during the live stream, they have all kinds of logos being flashed up on the live stream for people to see and supporters and sponsors and all that kind of stuff. And when we talked to him last year, of course, you know, TPF spent a lot of money, too, to have the Twippies at the show. And so there was the debate of, well, does TPF really need their logo, you know, splashed up on the live stream. And I told Jeff that, well, no, if we're going to have the TPF, you know, backdrops, you know, behind the ceremony, that will be perfect. And so that was kind of the agreement that we made. And so that's why the TPF set and repeats are behind the Twippies. And I think they look awesome. They look really good. Well, what's the other logo? Or is it just TPF logos? It's the standard TPF logo. This is the standard logo. Now, well, you know, maybe we can get one that alternates because, you know, the step and repeat is just that checkerboard pattern. Yeah. And it's not the different, you know. That's why I thought there was like two different logos that were, one was with a white background, one was with a black background. But I guess it's the same logo. I don't know. No, the logo is just on the white background. And I think the black, I don't know. I have to go back. Whatever. I've slept. Whatever. You just want the logo up there because you did it, so. No. No. No, I want the logo up there because it looks awesome. Whether I did it or not, I'm very proud of it, and I think it would look kick-ass and a big, giant... Maybe I'll print out the fucking banner myself and send it down. You're a dancing bear. We'll see. You just dance, okay? You don't need to be giving advice on how to run things, okay? You just stay in your lane. Stay in your lane. P's and Q's. Stay in your lane. What are P's and Q's, anyway? It has to stand for something. A word with a P and a word with a Q. mind your yeah what does that stand for let me let me google that really quick principles and questions i don't know yeah go ahead and google that because it's time to wrap up is an english language expression meaning mind your manners uh let's see it doesn't really explain though what the p and q stands for god damn performance no no you're guessing performance no no it's it's it's showing you a list of different things it could stand for Oh, but it doesn't say what. Come on. Nobody knows. Everybody says it, and nobody knows. No, this has got to be it. It's got to be a name out there. This can obviously be edited out of the show, but let's see. Exactly, RPs and Qs. Mind your pixie sticks and quisp. Nice one, Ed. I know. Well, I know this was not going to get edited out, so. Well, no, I was going to leave the Google thing in, but it's uneventful, so maybe not. anyway alright we're going to wrap up the show it was a dandy one I'd like to thank again Joe Kamenko for joining us for such an awesome interview and don't forget to join the Barlow's Pin Pets Shelter Drive drop off your stuff, send your photo in if I didn't say that's right I might not have said that you need to take a picture of your donation whether it's the back of your truck all loaded up with stuff or a big pile the stuff that you dropped off at the shelter or however somehow get us a photo of your donation so we can see what you did and show off to everybody else and hopefully inspire them to do the same and uh check out our facebook page for those fantastic prizes we did not do an art school with christopher franchi this episode because i'm kind of running out of things to talk about i was kind of hoping that you guys would send questions and then i realized wait we never give out our email address. That's right. So here's the chance. Alright, if you need to reach us, please send your questions to the superawesomepinball at gmail.com. There you go. superawesomepinball at gmail.com. So again, those prizes are the voodoo glass, the Monster Bash Playfield, and the Jaws Translight. What more do you need? So please donate. Do what you can. Boys, we'll see you next show. We'll have another killer show, I'm sure. Everybody else out there, take it easy. Enjoy pinball. Be nice. Please. Let's try and not scare any more podcasts and websites away with shitty attitudes. Let's have fun. It's pinball. Come on. Thanks, everybody. All right. See ya. The commentary and opinions shared by the cast and guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the sponsors, Cointaker, Chicago Gaming Company, and Back Alley Creations. Their sponsorships of this show only serve to add to their continuing support of the pinball community. Cause we're gonna be legends And get their attention What we're doing here in ancient theory Is about to be legendary Well, I'm the dude To you fair Spanish ladies It's the bathroom The bathroom Okay, bye-bye now Bye-bye. Bye. Bye, goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye. Later, kids. Goodbye, goodbye. Good friends, goodbye. Is this over? I feel like it's over! Bye, bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye. Bye. Good day, sir. Get the fuck out of here. I gotta go. I'll see you later. Wait a... Okay, okay. Show's over. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Hasta la vista. Hey, your fucking chalupa sucks, dude! You're welcome.