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. Valley 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 back box 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 napkin 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 Balser 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.