you'll listen to the head-to-head people podcast find us on facebook email us at Welcome everybody to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is episode 96 and my name is Martin. With me... Joe Lemire. Hello Joe, how are you? Good, how are you? Yeah, I'm not too bad. I'm a little bit tired. We'll get to that later. I was up to very early hours of the morning at a comp. So... Yeah. And this time it seems you're more tired than I am. Because last time I was exhausted. You were really tired last time. But, you know, we managed to keep it together and somehow get an episode out. But this week, this week, Joe, this week's the big one. So we've actually got an interview with Gary Stern and have been trying to coordinate this with Gary for quite some time, like months and months and months. And it's just, you know, you've got to find Gary at the right time when he's got time to be able to do this kind of interview. And it just so happened that he happened to be in Shanghai for an expo and the time zones were very similar to his. So we were able to make it happen. And it was a good chat. So let's go to the interview and then we can deep dive. I can't wait to hear what the next three titles are. We're about to find out what the next three titles are. Very exciting. Here he is. Roll camera. This is Gary Stern. How are you, Gary? I'm wonderful. I'm in Shanghai because we have the IAAPA Asia show. IAAPA is the Park Association, and it has a trade show, commercial show in Asia this time of year. It moves from place to place. It's in Shanghai this year. It's been in Singapore. It's been in many, many different places. in Asia. Well, as you know, I'm obviously in Australia and we're close to Asia, so I've been to a lot of Asian countries and cities and I've not really seen pinball there. So is that an emerging market, do you think? Or am I just not seeing them? No, there is pinball, but not to the extent... Well, Australia is a very heavily pinball populated country. Asia that pinball isn't as popular as in Western Europe or Asia or North America or South America. But it is a growing market. It is Americana for one. And again, it depends somewhat on the country. We have a customer here in China, and we're showing a game at the fair tomorrow. and we know we have to do some work to educate people. There are a lot of expat bars. There's a place here that I'll be at tomorrow night called Cages. It's a 40,000 square foot or about 4,000 square meter bar. I'd say the customers are half expat and half local. It has USA-style batting cages for American baseball and it has lots of different games plus, of course, it has food and the most important part, it has beer and other drinks. So, yes, I've been there and I know I can testify to have options. And it's that kind of thing. We have somebody who's going to be like a certain Army member and work tournaments and events there so that we can promote the pinballs. And that's what we have to do, partly expat, partly local. And there's too many people in China to ignore it as a possible growing market. It's harder, though, where they don't have a history. Well, of course. But, you know, as the CEO of Stern Pinball, right, you are the face, the man behind the name. and I do want to sort of delve into sort of your role there and what you do and what a day in the life is but you really are managing the business but also promoting the business and you've had to do that when pinball was at its heights and also when it's at its lows. So what sort of approach do you take into like an emerging market like that where you've got to establish pinball as a thing? I used to do, now we've grown quite a bit And we've been, for the last number of years, we're up 25%, 30% year on year, compounded 25%, 30% in our volume. Pinball has grown, and most of that growth, I will say, is the result of efforts that we've made. It sounds conceited, but to tell you the truth, we have promoted pinball. You know, we're at Consumer Electronics, so Comic-Con in the middle of July. We'll be at the Comic-Con, 135,000 comic book enthusiasts, who are very much like pinball enthusiasts, and there's a lot of crossover. And many different events and publicities and so forth. And so pinball has become even more recognized than it was decades ago. and you see people, companies use pinball for their advertising vehicle. You know, 32nd and it's in the Super Bowl, our American major sporting event, that is using pinball in the end. So, you know, we have promoted and increased the growth of pinball. You know, we aren't just a pinball manufacturing company. Well, the other thing, of course, that's increased is that we make three cornerstone games a year. So we have variety that's out there in the public domain. We make pro, premium, and LE on those three cornerstone games. We make usually a vault every year, maybe a studio every year. So that's probably 11 new models a year that are made for many years, you know, multiple years. So you can figure in any year we're going to build 25 different models of pinball. We've had as much as seven changeovers in one day in our pinball manufacturing. But what we are is much more than a pinball manufacturer. Pinball has certainly become a lifestyle brand. We make terrestrial pinballs. We also have digital pinball. We have accessories. We have merchandise. We have arts business, of course, very important. We have the Stern Army and now the Insider, which is a loyalty club. And we have two versions of the Insider, two kinds of membership, the free membership. and for a few dollars you get an expanded membership where you get special, open the seats to participate in special events, podcasts, webinars, what have you. We have the Stern Pro Tour, an association with Papa and the IFPA. It's everything to promote and make pinball the lifestyle brand. And if you look at IFPA as an example, 15 years ago they had 500 IFPA-ranked players. They now are about 70,000 in 30 countries. So pinball has grown, and certainly Papa and IFPA have helped that. Papa has their Pittsburgh tournament in July. They allow 1,000 people to compete. and those 1,000 spots sold out in, I think, six seconds. They now have 500 waiting on a waiting list if somebody drops out. So pinball, it's a lifestyle brand. It's worldwide. We export to 40%, give or take, of our game, and it's growing every year. And I have to pat the people I work with on the back. We're making great games and many great games. the other thing we do that's real important and the publicity and what have you that's real important is that we in our pro games make in our cornerstone games make three versions, a pro, a premium and an LA and we don't just make the same game and call them different things and slap a little difference on them the pro is you know it's good better best it's a marketing statement, good better best you hear that, the pro is here to the street operator, FEC operator, we're growing your FECs, although some enthusiasts buy it and rec room buyers buy it. We have a limited edition, as you know, for collectors and for enthusiasts, and we have a premium. And I will say that most operators should operate pros, but if they have in a particular pub an enthusiast base of beer drinkers, then maybe they should have a premium in there. But the premium, as your listeners know, has the play features of an LE, just not as much eye candy. so what we've done is we've created we've created if you don't go forward you go backwards and we've created a much bigger interest in pinball and again not just with pinball aficionados but with the broader public if we don't have games on the street if we don't have operators putting games in barcades in FECs in bars and bowling alleys and what have you, if we don't have that today and have a proper game for them, easy to service, price right, if we don't have that for them, then in 20, 30 years, we won't have 45-year-old rec room buyers who want to buy games to the home and we won't have enough volume and so forth for collectors to have a business and you'll have people thinking that, okay, I've got a pinball. that's an antique. Don't play it. Don't touch it. You need to have these games there to be played. So I just want to go back on something that you said before, because I know over the years you have said you're a manufacturer first and foremost. How important do you think it was? Because as pinball people, we look at that and go, well, hang on, it's all about the pinball. How important do you think it was for you to actually get the manufacturing right to have a product that would survive in the market? It was important, and I think we have, although we're still improving it. We take seriously any reports of anything that's not proper, and we're increasing it, and we're adding to it. We will be interconnected next year or at the end of this year, which all products do. So, you know, your phone or your TV or whatever, you download code, you have interactive events and so forth. Will you have connections between machines, do you think? Eventually, yeah, absolutely. That will happen. Absolutely, that will happen. But we, you know, we're much more than a manufacturer today. We were, you know, a family-owned manufacturing, commercial manufacturing business. And we've changed that also with my partner's driving and leadership, too, Dave Peterson. And, you know, we are much more than that. We've decided, we've converted ourselves and decided that we're a lifestyle brand. And we've done research, and so our recognition and everything else. we're becoming a very recognized lifestyle brand and I think that's very important I think that we are driving pinball I think everybody would agree with that and we have to drive forward because otherwise we go backwards and we've expanded what we do digitally as you know and Oculus and so forth and Oculus wants us because we're hot we're cool so there's so much and we have variety so you're certainly the leader I don't think that's disputed But, you know, for a while, you pretty much had the market to yourself. It was a blue ocean, effectively, you know, but there's a lot more competitors now. Does that influence your future or do you just see the future anyway and you are the ones that set the future? Okay, I like that. Yeah, we set the future. I believe in that. As long as we keep going forward because we have the people, the staff, we can afford the engineering, the improvements, what have you, and still make a reasonably priced product. As far as competition, there are other companies making pinball. Some of them are trying to do it commercially. Some are, I'm going to say, hobbyists, and that's good. It's just like, you know, we look at a model like Harley-Davidson in America and outside of America, and they have a core of players. They have a core of riders. They have enthusiast riders. They have some commercial business, not as much as they want that. And they have what I call suburbanites who have a bike, and I usually buy theirs used. They're your rec room buyer. We're different in that we've crossed the millennial divide, whereas they're having trouble having young people, and that's why old people like me have three Harleys or something like that. One of them is 26 years old. It belonged to a friend of mine and he gave it to me because there's nothing else to do with it. But I actually happen to like it. The point is that they're a lifestyle brand, we're a lifestyle brand. You drive the advancement of the product. They've changed their products significantly trying to get young people. We have a broad market and a broader market. Again, we have barcades. You're having barcades open in Australia. We're the entertainment. We're the entertainment instead of a DJ or a band. Yeah, because you've also said that you wanted to be – I think that the statement was all things pinball, right? Wherever you are – Yeah, that does. Okay. So let's say you've got barcades. You've got your Family Entertainment Center's FSEs. You've got the home market. You've also then started looking at, you know, let's call them real lifestyle brands like Supreme. Then you've gone Beatles with, you know, the mega license. And back to Supreme, we make and we're working on another large co-branded private label game that, again, we don't sell. They use for their commercial purposes or their sale. but think of it think of the exposure the supreme gave us that they had gave pinball and us of course but pinball they had uh you know their videos that they did people watching it uh they had what three million three million views something like that in the first uh uh day that they had their video up they sold out i think in three seconds uh i mean this this is great exposure for pinball. The reason they did pinball is pinball's cool. We're able to make games like that, to make them good quality games. Yes, there's a scale that lets us do so many things. It still takes time. We have to do our bread and butter right. We're developing and we're growing. You ain't seen anything yet. Ain't seen nothing yet. I think that's what we used to say years ago. We've got a lot to do. There's so much more to do. With the brand that you're now talking about, you know, kind of like the whole Supreme thing, is it going to be like as, you know, revered a brand as Supreme? And obviously it could be a different market, but will it be like another, you know, layout machine that's been rethemed or is it going to be a new machine for that brand? Oh, for private label, we have two platforms that we modify slightly. slightly. One is the one that Pat Shrew-Ribbon used with the wheels in it, and the other is the one that we used with Supreme. We have those playfields so that we can economically make these games with some minor variation. And I will say the technology that is developed in manufacturing and printing and basically in Marc Silk screen printing, printing playfields instead of Marc Silk screening them and doing it with digital printing instead of making rubies and all this. The cabinet decal printing. With those two layouts that you've got, obviously the Pabst, the Woney Lee, and what was the, I think, the Spider-Man Home Edition, does it also, you know, those two ones also make it easier because you don't necessarily have to worry too much about video assets as well, because that's going to add to your development costs and also to your development cycle. Yeah, you're right about that. And, of course, the home edition games, that's a different business. Although there are similarities in the cabinets and the games and all that, we are what we call the pro, which was a non-coin-off game. We'll be reintroducing again. We're learning each time, and now I think we're at a formula and understand the product, that we can make a less expensive game, not really for the losers who really are going to be enthusiasts and want more games. Although that game played great, I will say that. It was fun and it played great. These aren't hard-won machines. They're supposed to be fun. I got to play the Spider-Man Home Edition of Puppet a couple of years ago, and I was really surprised that it didn't feel like a cut-down game. It was actually a full game. Well, it is a full-size playfield. You know, yeah. You know, the cabinet may be shrunk a little, but the playfield's totally full-size. So, yeah. You know, that's, again, everything pinball and with Stern, you know, Stern being recognized as the quality leader in the product. Is making pinball hard? Gee, and a very simple answer, yes. Yeah. Okay. We have about 110,000 square foot or 10,000 square meter factory. We make some of our playfield. We make our wiring harnesses, so we're sort of suppliers to ourselves. There are typically 350 people in that building on any working day. there's near 50 in the development staff in order to do all these games there's four design teams and we use very many outside artists and other sound and video people so yeah there's a lot going on there's a lot of people to develop and other people working very hard to increase the things the games do. Again, we'll be interconnected. We've done a lot. We've done some software changes in our underlying systems recently. All that takes a lot of work. We both want to serve as the operator and the homeowner. Yeah, we as players, we just want to start the ball and flip things around. We sort of don't really understand what it takes to even just change a platform. Like you had to develop the Spike system and then Spike 2 to have an evolution. Are you going to be having to evolve again to cope with all the new innovations that are coming with that, or will it be on the same platform? Spike is a scalable system. In other words, you can build on its base. so we'll keep building there'll be improvements on that system or additions to that system will it become a day when we'll have to have a new system? sure there will this is not going to go on the company is 33 years old and I doubt when it's 66 it'll be using Spike God knows what we'll be using then the world will change and we will be in the forefront of the change And again, if you look at what we do, yes, we have people that are competitors, if you would. Some of them are hobbyists that make some cool, fun things. Or not fun, but at least they're different. Once a year, once every year and a half. Some people want to be full men of autism. Okay, great. we have to move forward and make improvements. And if you look what's under our hood to what's under anybody else's hood, you can see that we've invested the money in order to make improvements. And basically, you know, you pour a lot of money back in. That's what you have to do. In the old days, though, William, when my father ran it, he would say when he made money, he bought tooling. In other words, things that make parts better and more effectively and more affordably. You reinvest. So when you think about you, Gary Stern, in your role, what aspect of it gives you the most joy or satisfaction? Is it being out there promoting? Is it, you know, seeing machines come off the line? Is it making sure you've got an efficient, you know, assembly line? Or, you know, is it chasing down the elusive license or even just dealing with licenses? What is it that you think is the most joyful? I don't know if I could divide it out like that, but if I had to say something, it was seeing change and improvement and growth in terrestrial pinball and in all the other things that we do. Seeing the addition of the other things that help pinball, the things that help both the enthusiasts trick out his game or download code or what have you, and the operator making it viable for him, all the improvements that people are working very hard to make your product better. So when you're then in the boardroom, right, and you've got all your senior staff there, are you up there saying, I want more innovation, or are you saying, I want more efficiency, or are you saying, I want more dollars? That Gary Stern wants when you're in front of your crew. The people who work in our pinball company, many of them have been in it for a good part or all of their working career. They want to improve. They want to make things better. The production people want to make things more quality and better production. You know, it's not I want this, I want that. We all want that. It's discussion of how to do it. We have a senior management meeting every week. We have development meetings daily with everybody. We have, which George Gomez, you know, runs that. Doesn't need me sitting in every one of them. I don't do everything. You know, there was a time, again, we were a family, you know, a family-type business. As I say family, it was me. Michael Donovan, our CFO, still is. My father died before we started this company. But nonetheless, we ran it in a different way. And now everybody's participating. And you don't have to tell them I want more quality or I want more features and improvements. They want to do that. The only thing you might need to discuss is prioritization. But, you know, there's a lot of consensus. And probably Bill of Materials as well. I think you can't always do everything. Let me point out, we do have budgets. And, you know, this is a business. And if one thinks that you're going to run this without, we have a 72-page business plan every year, very detailed. And, yeah, Bill of Materials is part of it. And you can't just say, I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to do this. You have to look and say, what can I do and I can afford? You know, if you look at the automobile business and you get in America, guys like Lee Iacocca who love cars at Ford or whoever, I mean at Chrysler. You know, these people, they love cars and they want to design cars and they want to make cars. And they want to make money at those cars so that, A, they can make more cars for people who enjoy them. There's no point in making a car. It's not an art form. It's an automobile. It's supposed to do something. And they need to make money so they can design the next car. They don't want to make one car and that's the end of it. So they have to have budgets and they have to run it like a business. And that is very important. It's not a hobby. People talk about this as a hobby. It's not a hobby. For us, it's a business. For an operator, it's not a hobby. It's a business. It's a hobby to the enthusiasts who really get into it, and we love them, and we love that they like our games, and we've got to make them fun for them. If I go back to my father's day, and this is true of all game design, you want to increase your player base. You want to keep your core. You guys, the better players are great players, and that's why we have tournaments and everything else. But you want to increase the number of people playing. So you have to have something deep for the better player, but you better have some rules, some spell-outs, some things the casual player can understand so that he finds it's fun. One of the things that happened to pinball is as the pinball players got better, the designers made them harder. And then the pinball player got better, and the designer made it harder. And the pinball player got better, and the designer made it harder, basically designing for each other. And then that great pinball player had a family, had this, had that, stopped going out. This was before collecting really became major. Stopped going out. And the new players played the games and said, this isn't fun. It's too hard. There's nothing fun here. I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. I can't figure it out. So we have to have the casual player and we have to still keep involved the great player. And this is not just pinball. It's video games. It's English AWPs. It's the machines in your hotels. It's the same everywhere. In our last episode, I was talking about pricing because there's people sort of talking about the fact that the prices of machines have gone up. And I made the point last week by saying, and you said it, you're a business, right? You're a company. You've actually got to make money. That's the reason why companies exist. You're not a charity or a not-for-profit, right? No. No, you're not. I don't. A lot of people do because we're the end user. We just want to... You know what? We actually just want a cheap, people machine. It's actually what we want, Gary. We actually just want a cheap, people machine. We want to pay $1,000 less than what we paid for the last one. That's just who we are as humans. But you've obviously got to be able to test the market. And this is what I said last week. I said, as a business, you need to understand what is the value. you can actually sell these machines at because ultimately what you were saying before is you can invest back in the machine, you can have your R&D department, start all the innovation, you can upgrade your tools, you can improve the quality, all that kind of stuff. The only way you can do that is if you make more money. That's right. That's right. If you take our pro model in particular, it is underpriced. It is underpriced. We don't make enough money on it, But we think it's important for operators and for homeowners to have a, there is a elasticity of demand, and we want to keep the price as best as we can. But it's the same with anything else. Your car has gone up in price. Your washing machine has gone up in price, you know. And you look at what's going on with trade wars right now. We've got raw materials going up in price. You know, there's a lot going on. We also have 250 people to pay every day, every week, every two weeks, as the case may be. And we need to provide work for them. We can't send them home every other day or something. We have to keep them working on a consistent basis because they need work, and we need them. So it's a business. So how important is it for you to make sure that every new machine that comes out is a hit? Some are better than others. I can imagine. Some are better than others, but I think they're all wonderful. They're all my children. We certainly want to have every design and every game being great. We make improvements as we go along with them when necessary. So, yeah, it's important. Every game's important. Everyone's important. But that's why you've got a good model where you are able to... Let's say a particular machine is a bit slower. you can then do a studio or you can then do you know a vault to to be able to keep the well the assembly line running that's really what's important yeah yes we we do plan we do plan those models you know to fill in we're hoping that uh not to fill in to be part of the part of the business they're not really fillers they're made for you know uh more than to be just fillers as part of the different things that are available. I mean, Batman was not a filler. It was, you know, a play-in game. Beatles was not a filler. This is, you know, there's the title of a lifetime to get that. 1964 Beatles, because that's the year they first came to the United States. Yeah, so any event. But, yeah, we have other games, you know, and we can shift the production around some in order to adapt for that. But yes, we need to keep it rolling for everybody's benefit, for our customers' benefit and ours. Now, before we did this interview, I did promise you that I wouldn't ask about future titles. I'm about to go back on that. Do you think we would ever see a Tron or a Lord of the Rings vault? I hear what you're saying. I know you hear it. There were two excellent games and very interesting games. You know, and Tron, what's really interesting about it is, although Borgi designed it as a pinball machine, George Gomez designed the video game, the original video game. So, you know, it's a great title for us. It was a great game. Certainly it was underbuilt for today's market, but, you know, it was built when the market, you know, was just recovering from the Lehman Brothers recession, you know, a few years after that. So, interesting game. Interesting game. We've done Lord a number of times and so forth. So that was George's game. Great game. Great. Well, they are. I mean, and there is still so much demand for them. The prices of those, you know, in Australia, and as you know, Gary, there's two things about prices of pinball machines in Australia. A, our exchange rate is really terrible. And B, we just don't have that many titles. So, you know, the price just gets... push up for some of these things. And Tron's the Lord of the Rings to go for, you know, astronomical prices. And I guess that's why people are sort of there. People keep talking about... And you don't necessarily tell me because, you know, that's the thing. I would say that. I would say they're great titles. Would we ever build them again? You know, it's not totally up to us. But I would say that if anybody's into pinball, buy what's available now and I'm not talking about use Tron and Lord but if that's what you want, great or buy another, you know, buy a Black Knight or buy you know, Monsters there's so many great games around don't save your money waiting for another Lord or Tron that'd be nice let me make, I'm not saying we're never going to build either of them again but I am saying, don't wait you buy something that you want now yeah fair enough so how involved are you in the selection of machines as in what's going to come next, what license is going to come you just leave it to your team? no there's many of us involved in it, last week I was in Las Vegas at the licensing show where we see licensors, Jody Dagberg and I go to that, Jody's does our new product, new business, which is a private label, and co-branded games, and he does the licensing. And he and I go to that, and he does other things, too. But we have a meeting where George is involved, Dave, my partner, John Fiscalius is in charge of sales. There's a bunch of us. We sit around a table, and we do this on a regular basis, and make lists. And there's two things involved. what's cool, what we think is current or pop culture. And the other thing is what will a design team want to do? There's no point in picking a great title if you're going to have, we have a 14-month design process, and you think you're going to have people who don't want to design a game, don't like the title, work on it for 14 months, and you're going to get anything good out of it. And that's so easy. So, you know, there's a lot of involvement. George will go back and socialize with his design teams. So there's a number of us involved. But do you ever sort of get a final say? Like, do you? I'm doing a hypothetical. I don't. It's a consensus. It's a consensus. Because if I say, you will design X, you know, and there's nobody who wants to design it, or the market people and the sales people don't think it's the right title. You know, it's a consensus. But have you ever been in a situation where you've had to say, come on, guys, that's not going to work, I'm shutting that down? Many years ago, we talked about Matrix and Lord of the Rings. And Matrix, they're very successful movies, you know, and then there was a second movie we could have come out with, and a third movie, so a prior, a current, and a subsequent event. And George wanted to do Matrix, and I made him do, I insisted he do Lord of the Rings. Was it great game, Lord of the Rings, and the second Matrix movie, if we had made Matrix and it came out the same time as the second movie? Eh, not so good. No, you probably did, like, literally dodged a bullet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very good. Now, on the other hand, we're the people who made Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero. Right. And the movie did okay in its days. It was over 100 million, which in its days was good. But every time we would read Variety, I would say, can you make Arnold, on the back lens, make Arnold bigger and the kids smaller? And I'd read again and say, make Arnold even bigger and the kids smaller. But, you know, now it's a much, you know, I'm older, the company's bigger, the people, you want a company, a business, a creative business to have more than me making all the decisions. You want everybody, because I'm not going to be there one day, you know, not that I'm going to retire, but they'll carry me out. So, you know, we need, it's a bigger business. It does more things than just a you know pinball manufacturing business and it needs more people of greater talent to express and use their talents So the titles that you probably released, I would say in recent memory, right, has really been appealing to an older demographic. People like me, I've got three of your machines. I've got a Munsters LE, I've got a Star Trek LE, which is my favorite machine that's ever been made. but what about the younger market? Is that something that's important to you? Do you have plans to tackle the market? Yeah, I think it is and I think that a lot of the Marvel stuff we do runs a little younger than some of the other stuff. Deadpool, Deadpool and I just watched the second movie on the plane again. I don't know why I did but it's funny. It's a problem. But it's adult. Well, when you say younger I'm thinking late teens or 20s I'm not thinking children per se Yes, children Yeah, that's what I'm thinking Because as you said before We're not getting any younger And we are pretty much the people that are soaking up these people machines But we aren't going to be around forever And I don't know whether you do think 30, 40, 50 years in the future It's hard Yeah, but we are thinking a lot more pop culture And so you'll see some titles that, you know, when we pick a title, we've got to remember we're exporting 40 or so percent of our games, 45 percent of our games. So we need something that appeals worldwide. We have to understand that we've got a 40, 45-year-old median age, I don't know, for your collectors. and you've got rec room buyers that are probably largely in their 40s and then you have the current trend of bar caves and FECs where you're talking about 20-somethings, maybe even some teens with the FECs. So you need something entitled as pop culture for the young and cool for the older. And again, you know, some of the things we've done, we're not children, but if you talk about you know, TV, you talk about Game of Thrones or some of the other TV stuff that we've done. They appeal to people of all ages. Walking Dead. Game of Thrones is Walking Dead. Thank you. I was trying to get that out of my mouth. I'm glad to have helped. You were very helpful. You were a great help. But that's true. That's true. So we're catching it. I will say that we may be looking at a little more 20s. But I'm not going to tell you that we're going to make games for 11-year-olds. Yeah, fair enough. I understand. But also then, here's something that you've also said before, and I can't directly quote you because I can't really remember. But, you know, what you'd said is really that you're trying to preserve almost like the heritage of pinball. Like it's a retro device. It needs to still remain retro. Is that still the case? Yes and no. I'm going to say that pinball is a ball and bat game. It's what it is. It's a ball and bat game. It's tennis. It's baseball. It's golf. It's a ball and bat game. And like any ball and bat game, keep your eye on the ball. and so forth. It is, you don't change the size of a tennis court and you don't make round pinball, although it's been tried. Okay? There is, it's a game with rules. So we need to preserve some of that. And yes, it's become, I always said it was retro and not nostalgia. Okay? There is a difference between retro and nostalgia. It is, it's become much more than that. And part of, And a good reason for that is the technology. And also, if you look at what young people are doing today, and a big reason of the barcade growth is, yes, it's entertainment for young people, 20s. Remember, in America, our drinking age is 21, so we're talking 20s. and but you know those people, those young people go out two or three times as much as their parents did and with the you know the cell phone the smart phone it's been a great thing for pinball because first of all you can you know the millennials learn things on their smart phone we have games on the digital games and Oculus games on phones and therefore, you know, that introduces them to pinball and they go and they play pinball. The bar caves, of course, have been a great growth to it. And one of the things young people do is, besides going out twice or three times as much as their parents, they need to show everybody where they've been. They need to socialize it. So they go to the bar caves and take selfies. Barcades are cool, so they go to a cool place and they send selfies to people showing what they're doing on their Facebook page or whatever it might be, Instagram and so forth. So all that technology has helped with young people. So does that make it a retro product or not? Maybe it's more modern today. And when we interconnect it, is that retro or is that really totally modern? So, I mean, I can't answer all that for you. I don't know. I don't know if it matters. You're still keeping the retro essence, but you're trying to modernize it, yeah? It's still the same size court, tennis court. And, you know, I happen to prefer myself what's called an Italian bottom. You know, two return lanes, two outlanes, and two flippers and so forth. Maybe three return, you know, three return lanes. and, you know, I like three pop-ups. That's me. You know what I like. So, in any event, you know, it's a, whether you want to call it retro or it's got rules. You know, today with all the things in advancement, it's much more than retro. You know, with an LCD screen and, you know, and soon interconnectivity, and there's more on these games than there were. 40 years ago. I do agree with you in that in recent years, I'm not going to name names, I'll probably do that after the interview's over, but there have been some people that have changed that formula, meaning the dimensions of the cabinet, where the LCD is displayed, how thin the backbox is, that's a bit of a giveaway as well, and how deep the cabinet is, and people really had sort of gone, no, I'm not really comfortable with that because that's not what I'm familiar with. But it doesn't matter. Once you get over the dimensions, if you look underneath the glass, as long as there's two flippers down the bottom, the rest I will accept. Yeah. I will point out that, you know, I talk about the dimensions and I've made wide bodies in the past, and some pretty good ones. Harry Williams' flight in 2000. Awesome. An amazing game. It's a classic game. But having said that, I know guys who every time in the 30 years ago, every time somebody, you know, we started making wide bodies, which are way too expensive to make, and Harry Williams pointed out, harder design because you need more parts or the ball dies from left to right. Now, he had too many parts. His solution in Flight 2000 with a ball walker was great. You needed to limit the area. I know people who were in business in those days that whenever we did wide bodies, would refresh their resume and get it ready to send out because that was the kiss of death. That showed the market was on the way down. and if you look at it, there are some great wide-body games, but it really was not indicative of a strong market. So I'm sort of reading between the lines, and basically what you're saying is we probably won't see a wide-body Stern in the future. There's no plans for that. You also won't see an Orbiter. Orbiter 1? Remember? Oh, my God. Yeah. What a great concept. I was amazed when I saw that for the first time. But after I played it... Unfortunately, we didn't have a game there. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a game, but it was cool. It was cool. It was freaking amazing. It blows my mind, Gary, that you were there at that time manifesting that machine. As I saw it for the very first time in an arcade, it blew my mind. I was like, what on earth is this? And it was sort of fun at the time, But the machine next to it would get my quarters. Yeah, we did that with Dixie Reinhardt, who was a plastic engineer living in Aspen. And he and his buddy had designed the toilets for the space shuttle. Okay. They were plastic guys. And he was living in a teepee behind his house in Aspen, Colorado. Sounds normal. I think we paid him in games at the end, and ultimately he sold a plastic shoe designed for the Japanese. He found me on the mountain one day, called me about 10 years ago. So he did very well with his plastic shoe with the Japanese. Interesting time. Why do Orbiter One? What was the purpose? Were you trying to do something really out there? Yeah, yeah. I'll tell you what happens. And, you know, why do P2K, Pinball 2000? And, again, George Gomez was greatly involved in it. No marketing guy. We knew it wasn't going to work. Because we at Stern, we told Sega that that wasn't going to work because we knew the economics of it. And the whole, I proved that conversion pinball was stupid when I made a conversion kit. At the same time as Steve Ritchie's high speed came out, I'm making a conversion for Valley Games. Well, why would you convert a Valley Game? You trade it in and buy a high speed. I was wrong, and they repeated my mistake. So any of that, because the conversion was part of what they wanted, a beautifully engineering product to about $2,000. But that didn't make it to $2,000. It was a misnomer. But if you looked at the finances, is a public company. And you look at the finances of 10Ks. And, you know, we knew. I told Sega, as I'm buying the pinball company from Sega, I said, well, it's getting out. You don't want to sell it. I get it, you know. They're getting out. Why did you come up with that concept? It was something different. We're trying to do something different in pinball to rejuvenate pinball. And when you try and change the tennis court, that's not the answer. It's doing more with the tennis court. It's interconnectivity. It's more reliable. An LCD display, if we all are afraid of that, it's really expensive. Yeah, I get that. But at what stage did you realize it? I'll say stinker because, you know, history is behind us, so we can just say stuff from that. But at what stage did you go? I don't know. I think we came out with it too soon. I think it could have been made into a game, Not into a new genre of pinball, but into a unique game. But I believe that we didn't have a game. We had a cool mechanical device. We didn't have a game. But rules were simpler then. Games were simpler then. So, I don't know. It was interesting. So then, I don't know which area you want to go back to, but maybe let's stick to current Stern years. Like, you know, the last, how long has it been? nearly 20 years in the modern Stern era, right? What? Well, the 80s pinball was just Stern. Yes, and then Sega. Before 1986. And then we sold it to Sega, and I brought it back from Sega. So, yeah. And so the company's 33 years old. Yeah, but just, I guess from the 2000 onwards, because that's kind of when we see the current incarnation and the lineage that goes back there. I'm going to actually tell you the major change in what we're doing. Yes, from 2000 onwards, but it even passed there. We went through the Lehman Brothers recession in 2000, 2008, 2009. My partner joined us. We cleaned up the business, so to speak, after getting through that recession. Some people didn't. We did. and then somewhat after the recession we decided that we're going to be much more than a terrestrial pinball company. We're going to be, as we say, everything pinball, a lifestyle brand. So the change was really in the early teens, you know, 12 or 13, when we really changed to do more than just make what we call terrestrial pinball machines. So what do you think was probably one of the hardest decisions that you've had to make in that time? I'll tell you one, oh my God, I'll tell you one decision. It was exceptionally hard, but it had to be, is to make it through the Lehman Brothers recession. We had to lay off, downsize the company significantly to make it through. We now, you know, we have, many of those people are working for us again, and again, we have 350 people in the building on any day. but you know those are the things to do to save the business and save it for some so we can get it for everybody you know it was difficult times you know we've been up and down but we're not going down again because now we have more of a base and we have more of a strong financial footing. Again, that's the important thing. It's a business. Like we said an hour and 45 minutes ago, it's a business. And if we don't treat it like a business with all the good and bad, then we won't have it. And I firmly believe that although there are other people making some pinballs, and some of it's very interesting. I go back to my Harley model. There are people who trick out Harleys. There are people who make car, you know, make one-off or small-volume motorcycles, all very interesting. But I find some of the people doing other things in our industry very interesting. If we don't exist, and again, this will sound egotistical, but if we don't exist, then pinball will not grow, it will shrink. Because if you don't grow, you shrink. And improvements in technology won't happen. We are dedicated to improving the technology. And you've got to make money to do it. Well, yeah, absolutely. Does it sort of bother you that, you know, as the biggest player, you're also the biggest target? No, no, that wouldn't bother me. Listen, Williams used to be the... Well, actually, Williams wasn't evil. We were the biggest target even when Williams was around. But that's another thing, you know. And now, that happened. How in tune with the feedback are you? Or do you just look at it and go, well, of course, we're the biggest, people fire away, whatever. Some of it's interesting and some of it isn't. Some of it is just a matter, I don't care what the product is, there's going to be a chat room where some people love you and some people hate you. Yeah. But, you know, I don't spend too much time on the chat room, but we have people who are doing this interesting input. We find out about some issues that way, and we have very good friends who are enthusiasts, and we have beta testers who are enthusiasts. So, you know, that's fine. That's fine. as long as people enjoy pinball and whether it's mine or somebody else's if they're into somebody else's eh, they'll get into ours later I hope you know seriously, as long as they like pinball you know and the other people do they're trying interesting things again, some of it is you know it's if nobody else is trying to do it then That wouldn't be a good sign, would it? Yeah. That's a sign of our success. Yeah, okay. I've just got one more question for you. So I know you're obviously... Good because I got a good idea. So I know you're a big fan of vodka. Like, everybody knows you're a big fan of vodka. I'm drinking it right now. Right. Well, did you know that gin is pretty similar to vodka? Right? It is. Yeah, I don't like gin. I don't like gin. Well, so my question to you was, If I sent you a bottle of Australia's best gin, would you try it? I would try it, but my son-in-law is a big gin drinker. So I would love it because I'd have it. I'd try it with him, but I would let him really tell me what he thought of it. He's a big gin drinker. I mean, he is a big gin drinker. He likes gin. No, he really does. yeah there you go and Doug Duva who is doing our we've hired Doug to do international sales although he's not here this is developing market more he'll be here in September when they have the next show he's in Europe right now and he used to sell games to his father and Doug was worldwide distributed in Chicago who his father was, Fred's court, was worldwide. And then he's done a number of other things, including President Willis or America. And he helped Chicago Gaming develop a dealer network. And so he's, you know, especially in America. So he's joined us. We've got a young Eric, the guy doing the dealer sales for the people who sell B2C in America. And Ryan Cravens, his father was a very good friend of mine, has just joined us. He's been in the game industry since he was born, as his father was. And so he's joined us for domestic sales. So we're increasing the staff, the company, in order to do things better. not because we think we're not going to grow, because we are going to grow. And to grow, we need the people and the tools to grow with. One of the tools is right now we're putting in a new ERP system, and that's a big job and a fortune to do. But if you're a manufacturer, you know, for that sales and manufacturing company, and again, I think of it as a lifestyle company, but we are making the product, you need a modern ERP. And ours is way outdated. think about somebody else trying to really make pinball machines without first spending uh half three quarters of a million dollars on an erp well i mean in any anything of our of our size of building you know we're doing 60 you know you know not all the time but we're doing 60 70 games a day uh and as i said seven seven changeovers in one day yeah so you know it's better than yes it's underlying manufacturing but we're driving the business that's the build the demand, the purpose is not to be a manufacturer. The purpose is we're a lifestyle brand and we need the product to support that brand. So, obviously, you've been out to Australia a number of times and then I met you at Pinfest last year in Newcastle. Is the Australian market growing at the same rate as the world? Because we're a significant market for you. Yeah, it's been a great market for us. I will say that, as you said, you suffer from the... Yes, it's growing. definitely you do suffer from it when we did ACDC you were a huge part of our business over 10% at that time when we did it the first time you still are because remember the dollar was about 30% different than it is now but you're still a great case we make a lot of different games right now we're making Black Knight Pro and Premium We've got more monsters, Pro and Premium, either this month or next month. Beatles, Gold, Deadpool, more Pro and Premium. Love the game. George did a great job. And that's a game that really earns great money for the operator. The people understand what to do with it. We're making more Iron Maiden, Pro and Premium. We're going to make some more Guardians of the Galaxy, Pro version, Batman and now Catwoman art package on it and more Star Trek and Premium and we've got a couple primers available through the band so we have, this month next month we've got a lot of games available a lot of different titles something nobody else can ever do so business is good business is good but the reason it's good is that we do have product and variety for people. I love going to Australia. I typically certainly I go to Sydney and I've gone the last few times to Brisbane. There's two bar caves there that I've been to and whose names slip my mind right now. Wonder one of the two in Brisbane. One just reopened because they've Yeah, Netherworld and the other one where they burned the kitchen down, so they had a rebuild. And Katie, I've been to both of them. That's cool. You've got the trend going there. I went to Harley, and I go to Server's Paradise. And unfortunately, not enough time to lay on the beach, but I go to the two time zones up there. Yeah, they're pretty big. Juan was a very good friend of mine. Jamin does a great job, and Juan was a very good friend of ours. So, you know, I like Australia. I like to go there and I get my Harley out of Brisbane and go ride. Awesome. Well, hopefully we'll get to see you next time. Thanks very much for your time today. Now you've got to go off and conquer China and get pinball into every home somehow, maybe. And into expat and Chinese bars. Yes. And their family entertainment centers, their games centers. so there's a lot to do here big market I bet there is I bet there is awesome good thanks Gary really appreciate it mate thank you Mark thank you for your interest appreciate it thank you thanks mate bye now bye bye bye so there you go Joe that was Gary Stern what did you learn from that conversation that the man knows a lot about pinball and how to make pinball okay so So, look, as you know, the angle that I went was, I didn't want to go, okay, when is Elvira coming out? When's Jurassic World coming out? All that kind of stuff. I know everybody wants to know that. He was never going to tell me the answer to that, so I wasn't going to ask him. We talked beforehand, and I told him that I wasn't going to ask him. But then I chucked in the sneaky Tron and Lord of the Rings thing, which we'll come back to. But I really wanted to focus on the person who is effectively the number one person at Stern. And I was really curious to know how in touch with his business he is. You know what I mean? And you're right. He actually knows a lot about everything that's going on in his business. And I was really pleased to hear that. And that's why he could elaborate on all of those points. yeah and he's been doing it for a long time longer than i've been alive so you know and i've always wondered like what his current role is i mean he seems to be the guy who goes out and sells stern and sells pinball and he's at all the shows and you know that stuff like that i'd be curious to just see a day just like to a fly on the wall to see a day in the life of stern and like just follow him around as a fly to just see how everything goes. He's so cool. And so that was kind of one of the questions that I wanted to know what a day in the life of Gary was. But I don't know whether we really fully got to explore that. Again, I was just keen to know more about the business side, the manufacturing side, what it's like to be the CEO of the number one pinball company in the world and what makes that different to all the others. and it's interesting because I was talking about other manufacturers and all the boutiques and all that kind of stuff. I don't think he's bothered. No. And my biggest takeaway, pinball's really easy. I mean, he's said it constantly. Like, guys, this is so easy. Did you like the bit where I did say to him, look, I'm just going to be blunt, he's making pinball hard. And you could tell he knew exactly what I was referring to when I asked that question. I know, because he kind of paused. It was like, ah. There was a bit of a smirk in his voice that I noticed. I giggled. I giggled when you said that. I was like, ah, there he is. It was really good. Going for it. So what was your real sort of big take out from it as far as new information goes? I mean, my only thing I cared about is he said that Lord of the Rings could happen. That's the only thing I care about. I'm excited about that. I mean, like you said, it is kind of out of his hands. It's up to Warner Brothers or whether or not they're going to play ball or not. But it was cool. Well, because one of the plans I was talking about was obviously, you know, the assembly line and keeping the warehouse full or the factory full. And I just think it's a matter of time, maybe. that they just need to know when they actually need to do one of these vaults and whether they need to go back and redo the license. Yeah. Because they will also have to, because these are on the, like, are they on the White Star? White Star System, right? So they've got to get that out of the box and rework that. Lord of the Rings, at least, is White Star. Yeah. They're not going to vault that, so it's going to have to be rewritten. But, like, the biggest, I mean, talk about the biggest, like, contrast. Like, oh, you could have made Matrix or Lord of the Rings. I think that's probably going to go down as, like, one of the best decisions in pinball ever. Well, I know. I know. Because he talked about the fact that the second movie was a bit of a dud. And it really was a bit of a dud compared to the first one. I actually do quite like the Matrix trilogy, mainly because I'm just, you know, turning on Park Your Brain at the door and just watch some visuals. That didn't bother me at all, but you're right. And obviously I didn't know that, that they were thinking of the Matrix. And we'd heard a rumour that a pinball manufacturer was going to be making a Matrix pinball machine, like they actually had the license. So I think that today, I think we always look back at the Matrix as the first movie, not necessarily the trilogy. And if that was the case, you could do a thing now because I think the Matrix, the first movie, has aged well in the minds of people. I think we've forgotten the tragedies of the two sequels. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, it's like a lot of things. I mean, the two sequels aren't as bad as people remember them as. And like you said, Bill, I mean, the second one and especially the third one are very, if you sit down and think about it. They're very deep thinkers, too. Like, they go, like, the conspiracy or whatever, the, I watched a video on it just going over, like, what it all meant, and I'm like, what? Like, man, I don't remember, like, thinking about it that hard, but it sounds like I should have. Like, I didn't realize that. And then, you know, I was like, I remember him dodging bullets, and I remember him, you know, he flew. Yeah, he did, and he beat up a hundred of those Mr. Smiths. Yeah, he jumped inside Mr. Smith and made him go kaboom. Yeah. And that's it. And there was that big freeway chase, and then there was this... Trinity was really annoying. Oh, wasn't she? I hate her. Yeah. She was borderline annoying in the first movie, and then just really... I just doubled down on it. Like, yeah, let's give you more Trinity. And we're like, no. Correct. But again, that was kind of interesting to hear from him sort of saying, you know, they had that choice. I mean it would have been interesting if they had done a Matrix pinball and whether it had been a bit of a flop but then he referred to Last Action Hero and the fact that that was considered Yeah Look at that self-deprecating Yeah That's good that you can still look at that I mean in all honesty I think the Matrix if they went back and did the Matrix now just like the first movie even if they took the first movie and like a couple pieces from each of the other movies like the good parts of the other movies I think that would be a great game Yeah So I definitely don't think that I mean we're making fun of it, but only because it's so much not as good as Lord of the Rings. But in its own little box, without that comparison, I think that it would be really cool. I know when I saw that re-theme that someone did for The Matrix, I thought that was cool. Yeah, of the Johnny Mnemonic. It's like, wow, imagine if they had a new game, like the same thing, but with a glove that worked. That'd be so cool. Or a glove that's quicker. Oh, and anything. It's a contrast because that game is so fast, and then you've got this slow club. Oh, and when the glove's not working, that game is so terrible. Like, the software compensation for that makes the game shit. The other thing that was really interesting, and I did sort of pick up on it with him, was the fact that he was saying, you know, Stern is a lifestyle brand. And I'm like, hang on, only a few years ago, you were sort of saying you are a manufacturer first. what I liked about that was him effectively saying, yeah, well, we had to change. Evolution. I know. I like that. I think it... I mean, I don't want to come across as a Stern fanboy because, God knows, I've never come across as a Stern fanboy before. But... Well, actually, I haven't, you know. But what is really highlighting to me is that, you know, a lot of people give Stern a lot of flack and say, oh, you know, we didn't get an LCD until two years after J.J.P. and we didn't get this and we didn't get that. He knows. He gets it. He knows everything that's going on with pinball. It doesn't mean that it's not coming. It just means that, and we've said this before, it's coming, but because they are the biggest manufacturer, they have got to get it right from the day it starts because, and he did say it, you don't want to release a product that's shit because you only get to do that once. Exactly, yeah, because if they launch something and it has problems, they're not going to get away with it. like some of these other companies. So it has to be right. And also, you know, taking your time and doing it right the first time is, you know, it's more important than just being first to market. Like it's way better to be, you know, second to market and mine works better or, you know, we've figured out we've – because if you watch someone else do something and you realize the limitations or what, you know, blah, blah, blah, and you can learn from that and then, you know, implement it within your implementation, which all of a sudden it's like, as if you had R&D that someone did for you that you just got to watch and go, yeah, look, that's not good. Let's not do that in ours. That's exactly right. They're like, okay, we've looked at the LCD screen that's so big and we've heard the feedback from people saying it's too big. How about we just put one in there, but it doesn't have to be so big. Okay, nailed it. Yeah, and I still think the biggest undocumented or untalked about issue with LCD is, like, even just the process of just deciding to go LCD and knowing behind it of all the problems and all of the limitations that come with an LCD. Sure, it has LCD now, but, like, now, like, licenses is going to be a massive problem. So it's, like, at some point, like, I'm sure that that was the decision. They're like, yeah, we could do this, but, you know, all of a sudden, everything is going to go up 50% on licensing costs because now we have to pay for the actual actor. Yeah. Yeah. and the actual stuff instead of dots, which I'm sure you get a discount if it's dots of some specific actor, versus, look, high definition. Look, no, I'm definitely sure that's him. Yeah, because, like, if you think about, like, you know, even, what is it, like, Tron or all the others that have got sort of clips. Actually, I was playing, you know, Transformers last night, which has sort of got some, you know, dot matrix sort of clips and stuff. You look at it and you go, that could be anything that actually doesn't look like the real actor or it's the myth of dots, effectively. Yeah, well, that was, I think, I believe that that was like, that or Game of Thrones, I believe, I don't even know if, the last conversion where they would take actual, because most of the stuff in Transformers are converted from actual movie clips. Yes, that's right. To dots. So, like, I'm sure that just that process of converting probably saved them 90% on the money or something like that versus, like, if you made that game today with the same exact things, but the clips from the movie, all of a sudden that game gets way more expensive. Yeah, because you've actually got the person in the clip as opposed to their likeness. Yeah, but then, at least now, you could just go back and not put Shia LaBeouf in there or whatever, and then you could just be like, oh, look, they're just Transformers. You don't have to pay for the likeness of, like, Optimus Prime. You just, you know, you can pay for his voice, but you don't have to pay for, like, look, it's Optimus. Yeah, that's right. Like, that comes with the Transformers stuff. Do you know what? I completely forgot that Shia LaBeouf was in Transformers. That's how... You know, that's one of, like... I mean, I know everyone hates him now. I mean, he was fine in that movie. The first one was fine. He was fine, but not... Okay, I don't want to go too much into Transformers and why I don't like it, but there's so much that goes on with that movie, it's hard for anything to stand out. So, it was hard for Shia LaBeouf to stand out because everything was just all happening at the same time. Yeah, and plus, the most important thing is, in a Transformers movie, you don't want the standout thing to be a person. He did his job. And he was, you know, at least he made those first two Transformers movies funny. And then the last ones were just bad. They're terrible. Way too much ball work. So the other thing that I took out from Gary was his comments around connectivity. so we kind of knew it was coming. Like, people have sort of over the... at seminars or interviews or whatever have sort of said it's coming. I guess we got some insight into what it is around, you know, who's basically saying being able to download code. Right. Well, that already is... It's minor, but it's cool. You know, I think that's huge. Like, the fact... Personally, if I was them... Gary, if you're listening, I would make it so that, like, obviously that to have a warranty on these machines you have to connect it as like a requirement for people to operate them because that because i think getting people to do it is going to be the hardest part even if it has it getting these people to actually hook it up like you can tell them till the till you're blue in the face yeah but we're gonna have updates and it's gonna like message your phone when there's something breaking but people are lazy and they're not going to do that unless you give them a really compelling reason to do that yeah so because i mean all a lot of the at least the operated stuff near me it's just that they just put it down and then that's it's it's the way it is forever so it's like if they can incentivize it to us to a huge portion to make them connect it so then it automatically updates and like because i mean i would imagine it's hugely valuable i don't even know how you put a number on that for stern to just everything goes into their database and they know exactly how much is earning. They know exactly how much something is draining in a specific place or this isn registering or like ugh the amount of money that worth Who knows Who knows Like, the audit information and just being like, yeah, we've noticed that on, you know, X game, it's draining all the time out the left. Right. Well, maybe we could do something about that on the next run or something, you know? Maybe. But he also said that they're going to connect to each other. Yes. Which was the interesting part of it. Yeah. Because that's obviously not how he answered. I'm like, well, hang on, are they? And he's like, yeah, they are. So I hope they do. I know Ryan C, when he was on, was always banging on about the fact that he wanted this kind of connectivity. I don't care that much. I still hold out hope for them being able to make, because this is what's important to me, someone being able to make a machine that's stream ready. And I said this before, because I mentioned this to Jersey Jack when he was out in Australia. You know, the fact that a recent release, Jersey Jack, has effectively got the player cam and you could put an output of the screen already because that's just HDMI. All it needs is one camera that's for the play field. There you go. You've got a streamable thing. And that would be cool if you could have that as your online connectivity so people would actually see what you're playing. although I don't know how you would accomplish that I mean I guess you'd have to have it on the top of the head and then you'd have to invert it and hopefully get a good enough angle imagine it just sort of slots forward out of the backbox and just looks down on the playfield easy done make it happen well I mean the I don't remember I never remember the name of it but the big Lebowski people didn't they have for like I don't know if it was on Lebowski and bribe, but didn't they have, like, you could see people playing online, and you could see the DMD of the game live? I don't know. I believe that that... Yeah. I believe that was a thing at some point. I remember it being talked about as if it was a thing. Yeah, I mean, look, I just think... When we were talking about Scorebit, so Scorebit, you know, the system that takes all your scores automatically from the DMD. It's so cool. It is so cool, right? So what I'm hoping is that all they're doing is they're setting up the infrastructure. It's now up to the community, up to us, to decide how we're going to use it. And that's exactly what will happen. If people don't give a shit about playing head-to-head with everybody online, it won't get used. But if it does get people excited about that stuff, then it'll go off. People will use it depending on what they want. they've just got to provide the infrastructure for it to work yeah definitely and I think that a connected game it's going to know like say use it in the context of like their global tournament thing they have right for Deadpool etc like so then they say we jump ahead and their next title is whatever and they're all connected so the specific game it'll know the specific game that you're putting up said score on, it knows everything that's going on in this game. It knows all the settings. It knows all the stuff. Probably at that point, they'll know the pitch. Maybe they have some way of knowing where the tilt is. So they can compare it nuts to nuts to any of the stuff that's happening on other machines. So I'm like, this is the game. This is the score I put up. They can look at that game at that time when you put the score up and know if you were full of shit or not. You know, or be like, yeah, that's all great, but we see here that the tilt bulb wasn't on or something, you know. Or you had extra balls set to 17. We liked the score, but we didn't notice three depth saves. Yeah. That's weird. We were like, oh, we registered, and then stuff up top did. It was weird. Something must have went wrong. So this is it, right? so if they can now draw down that kind of information now I don't know whether the tinfoil hats are going to come out and say oh you know that's my private data Stern is now spying on me I can tell you now that's going to happen my crystal ball moment right now people are going to go oh how dare Stern get my private information what private information? that you do death saves? yeah I mean Jersey Jack's already taking your picture without your permission so I mean like But is really, is it going to be because Stern's doing it? I don't know. I don't know. There was actually a tournament that was played. I don't think I was in it or I didn't see it happen, but somebody actually said in this tournament, I don't want to play in this tournament because that machine takes my throw time. Well, I saw it because I was watching the Willy Wonka stream and then one of the, like, thingies, whatever they call it, I don't know. What do you call it? It's like the stuff that they just play on the machine whenever you're not playing it. One of them says that, like, if you hold in the right flipper, you'll disable the camera. Yes, that's right, yeah. So I don't know if that's new on that machine or if that exists on all of the machines, or you can just hold in the right flipper. I mean, it's like, who cares? It's a selfie. You do it anyway. No, no, no. But you are in control of your selfies when you do it yourself. Yeah. That's probably true. I suppose. So the other thing I take out for me was, you know, we talked about Supreme, and you could tell he was very, very proud of what they had done with Supreme. And again, it's interesting because as consumers, there was just so much backlash about Supreme, right? But he's saying it was a massive triumph. Of course it was. Yeah, of course it was because they're going for a lot of money and it just got so much exposure in the pinball. Well, not just the pinball, in the general community, people sort of got more exposure to pinball, so that's got to be a thing. Probably something that I kind of did ask, but I missed out that bit really, was when we were talking about what are the base templates they're going to use for machines, and really I'd... I had one something jump out at me when you were doing that too. I know, because it was obviously they're talking about the Wonelly, although they did refer to it as the Pabst Can't Crush That template. So, that's interesting. He did drop Primus at some point. I know. So he didn't say that either of those. I know, but just obviously didn't mention Wonelly. And then obviously the Spider-Man Home was another one. But I'm kicking myself now because it was in my mind at the time, but the conversation was just going... I'm so curious if it's going to be what I'm thinking. Well, I should have said to him, and will Sea Witch be your third template? Oh, okay. There we go. Completely different ideas. Because that's really what it is, right? It's saying you've actually now remade an old machine that you've rethemed as Beatles. Surely that means that's your third template. I think that that's going to happen. Yeah. But I think it's going to be what we think it is about it's just going to be its own Sea Witch thing. but what I was hoping that you were going to mention when you met, the first thing that popped into my head is that, okay, what about Home Edition Avengers and Home Edition Transformers because when Supreme came out and then I think at some point Deadflip put up a post comparing the different Home Editions and I actually went and looked at the playfields for the Transformers and the Avengers Home Editions and those look like good playfields too just like Spider-Man, so I was like what about doing one of those because you have those, and those seem fun, too. Did you think of that? What do you mean? I don't understand what you mean. So, do you remember the... Yeah, for a template of doing, like, you know, whatever the next Supreme is, the Kardashians or something like that. The Kardashians! And, but using... The Kardashians is what's coming to your head about what the next lifestyle plan is going to be. I mean, if you think of anything that's just super popular for no apparent reason, what else could be the Kardashians? I hate the Kardashians. But, I mean, of all the things that are super popular for unknown reasons, there you go. There's one. But, like, I mean, have you looked at the Avengers Home Edition or Transformers Home Edition? I've never seen them in real life. Obviously, I played the Spider-Man Home Edition, and I compared, you know, photos of all of them. And I think, for me, what I'd noticed is that I think that the Transformers and Avengers Home Editions really were more of a home edition than Spider-Man home edition, which was just a full pinball machine. Like, it felt like a real pinball machine. It just didn't have a full sort of DMD, and it had pretty basic rules, and it didn't sort of have a coin mech. But for all intents and purposes, it was a fully-fledged machine that had just been homified. I don't know if that works. But as far as the playfield goes, I mean, the playfield looks fun. The playfield is a regular pinball playfield. But as I said, I don't know, maybe you do, because I don't know whether you've seen the Avengers or the Transformers home editions, but they just on photos that I've seen, they look like a premium home machine as opposed to a fully-fledged machine with some things taken out? Oh, definitely. I mean, yeah. One is definitely a... Yeah, it doesn't have the stuff that the Home Edition does. But, I mean, ultimately, that part doesn't matter. It's just the playfield does. So, I mean, if they just pop that playfield out and put it into a Supreme cabinet or whatever, then I think that would be something that would work, I think. Because it looks really fun. Like, I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at the Avengers one, and it looks pretty cool. Well, yeah. But I basically just pulled up the Transformers one. So we've just both picked the different ones. And it does look cool, but it does look more of a toy than the Spider-Man Home Edition. is really kind of what I'm trying to say. But he did mention that they are going to be doing more of these home pin ones, or the pin, they call them. So, and again, in his words, he's like, yeah, we think we've worked out the model for this. So I'd be keen to see. I mean, I would never have one, but I'd be keen to see if they can make it work. Yeah, it'd be cool. I think that at least it gives them more toys to play with. And I'm sure that they, you know, George could go in and look at the Avengers one or the Transformers one and mess with it a little. I mean, the Avengers one has a lot of toys on it. Like, it has in-lane drops. It has wraparound ramps. It's still got the spinning cube on it. So it's like there's still plenty there. But the Transformers and the Avengers, the pins for home, are the same machines. They're just different things. no they're not not for really I apparently have to look at the Transformers one okay do it in real time alright Transformers and let's see where's a good actual oh here we go oh that works see that's a lot quicker ah ah Are you a vegan? I'm in here and I see nothing but... Oh, shit, they are the same. Look at that. That's funny. Okay, sure. Okay, fine. Just use this one. That's funny. One is a Tesseract, the other one has, like, whatever that was called. Cosmic... Well, okay, where is it? It was the... What the heck was the name of that? I remember that from that movie. The one that said direct, and the other one was the... Damn it. Yeah, it was like the world builder. They used it to form worlds and shit. Damn it! I'm such a bad Transformers fan. No, I think you're just a normal Transformers fan that realizes that stuff doesn't matter. It's true. I don't know if that's like really Allspark Allspark Winning This is On that Did you know that you can buy an Allspark That you can plug in and it talks and says We must protect the Allspark Cube I'm not sure I'm interested in that You can buy a cube that talks In Optimus Prime's voice. That sounds like fun. Yeah. Back to Gary. Back to Gary. So anyway, so a new lifestyle brand is coming, as you said. So they were very pleased with Supreme, so they're going to try and do another sort of model like that. the new home edition machine is likely to come as well. They reckon they've got that model done. Connectivity, the remakes, the vaults of Lord of the Rings and Tron may or may not come. Who knows? Overall, good chat with Gary. He was really good. I'm glad that he gave me his time. He gave me 15 minutes more than we planned, which was awesome. So, it was good. Yeah, it was very cool. She was talking about Sega and all that stuff. Yeah. So, anyway. So, what do you think the next playstyle brand is? Look, it's hard to guess because I would never have guessed that they would have done Supreme. So I It's just too hard to guess right It could be anything Beats from Dre And beats to Dre I didn't know what Supreme was until Supreme happened So I don't know What's that big thing that like Heidi Klum No the other one like Goop or something Like she sells her own products Or something I don't know Could be anything Aviation gym that whoever it is, Ryan Reynolds, isn't he aviation gin? Something like that. Ah, there you go. Yeah. The Ghostbusters vodka or whatever. Or maybe it'll be George Clooney's whiskey or something. Or espresso. Yeah, there you go. So, I don't know. Anyway, it's coming. So, there you go. So, that was Gary's turn. so moving over to other manufacturers so we saw a really good stream of Willy Wonka this week from IEP it's Carl D'Python Anghelo I say we saw it, I haven't seen it yet but you saw it, what were your thoughts on now seeing like a really good high res stream of Wonka now that it's been out for a couple of months well I like to be able to speak for both of us, I feel very powerful I mean, I've played it I've played two different copies at two different sets of time places in time, and this is the first time I actually got to hear the game clearly, very clearly, unfortunately but I mean, from the start there was clearly power issues again with the flippers, that eventually they had to jack the flippers up like three-fourths of the way through the stream, and then it started shooting like you would expect it to shoot My biggest takeaway, a few takeaways are I really think that the audio is a mess. Okay. There are a couple things. The one, when you get to, well, the biggest annoying thing is that when you're in the pop bumpers, every single time you hit a pop bumper, it progressively moves through, like, the oompa loompas, saying, like, oompa doompa. you know that part like just that that segment it's like boom but do but and it's like this very slow drawn out thing it's oh my god it stands out like a sore thumb both of us both of us watched it and heard that and we're like that is that's so stupid like that sounds terrible so like that that was a really weird thing that it's just like oh but that would stand out and then i like and then it has this really cool which i think as far as i so far seeing the game, like, the greatest moment in the entire game, and I think, like, the best thing in the game, is when they get to the, um, the boat ride, and he starts doing his speech for the boat ride, and the lights, the whole light show with it is amazing, and it's so cool, but it gets stepped on by the rest of the game. Like, he's going through the speech, you know, and it doesn't seem to show any signs of slowing, and everything you're doing during this it's just everything you do is speaking over the entire scene so it's just like oh lock is lit oh you collected a kid oh wonka bar and it's like all over the place and it's just like it completely steps on the moment of what was like the most exciting thing I saw in the game that made me think of the movie was this thing and it's just like you miss half of it because everything you're doing it just seems like everything is so scatterbrained with the audio of the game because everything you hit has its own call out and it just jumps on top of whatever is going on so if you're in a thematic thing of whatever it is everything else you're shooting on the play field is like jumping on it and that audio call is over whatever you're doing and it doesn't have anything to do with what you're doing So it's so, like, all over the place of scattered call-outs and scattered weird noises, and it's very, very hectic and all over the place with the audio. But that can be fixed in code, surely. And that's... I think we've talked about this before, in that if you think about the priorities of what they've got to do when they're getting code up to version 1.0, So I think historically you've seen them add feature, as in flesh out the actual features of the code and the rules of what you need to do. Then they do a polish of the scoring. Then they do a polish of the audio and light show. That's usually, from what I've seen, that's usually what comes last. Yeah, which obviously that makes sense. obviously it's not close to being done yet, but, like, as a person who my initial interest in the game is solely around the theme, and, like, I love that movie, and I want to play that game to see what part of the movie's in there and stuff like that. And, like, seemingly really the only big part of the movie that's in there is that scene. So it was like, oh, God, I don't want to hear any, I just want to listen to Gene. It seems like maybe there's a poor sampling or something, because a lot of the Gene speech that is in the game sounds really weird compared to the rest of the sound in the game. It's lower and seemingly lower quality, so it stands out a lot more. There's a couple of quotes when you're getting walks that at some point I actually brought Leslie over to check because I wasn't sure. I'm like, does it just sound weird, or is that not really Gene? You know, and then, you know, you listen to it, and you're like, okay, it is Gene, but it just sounds off in some way. So I think that, I don't know if maybe that's what it is, but it's just, you know, like I like a lot of the games, I just wish there was more of the theme in there, because there's really, like there's a Candyman mode, and there's no Candyman song, or like there are no songs in the game. I mean, they have the instrumental theme for, like, I Got a Golden Ticket, but, like, you don't get to hear Gene sing any of his songs or, you know, the Candyman song or any of the other stuff in there, which is, like, I understand it's licensing, but I wouldn't think that that would be something that you couldn't get. Like, I don't know if there's a lot of... Yeah, I get that, but I think when we were talking, I can't remember who it was, whether it was Jerry Thompson, look at me, sort of name-dropping, you know, when it was when we had Jerry Thompson from Stern or when we had Chris Granner on, right? like legendary sound designer Chris Granna, where we sort of talked about the fact that it's all well and good that you've got all these sound bites and all these sound clips and all these sound effects, but think about all the possible combinations of all those things happening at the same time. You've got to balance that, and that itself is a bit of an art form as well, and I think that's part of the polish that happens where they're making sure that, you know, things don't Slash as far as the key that they're in, and that other sort of sounds don't drown out other things. And I think what you were saying about what you heard was that some of the sounds, and I think you said this more so before we recorded, were just like screeching or like, you know, fingernails on a chalkboard when they hit because they're just not balanced right and there's too much of it. Yeah, and it's just the matter of, yeah, everything has a sound. So you're hitting, everything you touch in the play field has some kind of weird sound associated to it, which just jumps on top of everything else that's there. But, I mean, like, when you're mentioning, like, that, like, I guess that that just comes down to when there's, as a fan of the movie, and if someone is a fan of the theme, there's, you know, specific moments that you just want to enjoy from the movie. Like, without being, like, if it's a matter of a stacking thing, like, I would just make it so that, like, nothing else has to make sound during that mode because that mode is so iconic and make it its own thing so that people can, you know, enjoy that part of the movie. The same thing if you get to, you know, or stuff like that where it's just like... I mean, if you watch the stream, like that moment when it's like he's going through the speech and the lights are going crazy and it just seems so awesome and he's just being overridden and you can't even hear what he's saying because it's like, lock is lit, wonka bar, bubble gum. And you're like, I just want to hear what he's saying. It's drowning him out. I agree with you. Okay, what about... Why pay for that if you're not going to, like, let it be heard? If you remember one of our favourite games of all time, The Hutt. Yeah, it's true. But, okay, the best moment in that game, and it's a real iconic... Not just that, and I think Wizard of Oz does it very similar as well. When you kill the witch and when you destroy Smaug, you know when the whole machine just stops and all you're focused on is the video footage that's happening behind? That moment right there is amazing because there's just nothing else going on. And what's happening is you're going from this frantic, oh my god, like, oh god, I was going to say, oh, you smell, for example, but bloody killing the witches is exactly the same, where everything you are, oh my god, on the edge of your seat, because if I miss this shot, oh my god, I'm going to have to start all over again, which is worse with Wizard of Oz, so, you know, sounds are going on, balls are flying everywhere, just flashing, and then, boom, it happens, stop, and you just watch this thing just unfold in front of you, pinball magic. Yep. And this is the opposite of that. Yeah, it's way too violent. Yeah, and the lights, like, if you remember that scene from the movie, and the lights on his face, and the way that the lights are strobing, and they're getting quicker and quicker and quicker, that's what the playfield lights are doing. The entire thing is strobing down towards you as he's going through the speech, and it's just like, ahhh! And you're just getting bombarded with these candy sounds, and And, ooh, Locke was lit in this terrible, I mean, I talked to Carl about it. He said that, like, apparently that the person who's talking and does all the callouts is supposed to be sounding like Grandpa. No, not even close. Like, not even, like, if you close your eyes, you could even get paws to sound anything like Grandpa. But he's just talking about all sorts of stuff, and you're just like, I'm trying to listen to Gene. Shut up. Like, this is an important thing. like that's a mode that I will try and get to get in every game I play of that and it's like a lot of the other scenes they just kind of happen in the background you don't get that immersion of you know like I wish the songs were in there maybe they are in there and they're just not in there yet or they're going to be there yet or Carl didn't get deep enough to see them but I guess it's only because I have such an attachment to the theme that I want I want to feel that and experience that when I'm playing that specific game, so it's probably not necessarily being fair to it, but that's the thing when you get themes like these, where it's like, I have expectations of what I, you know, and emotions that come to mind when these specific themes are used. But it's just like from that, I mean, it seemed very... I know that Carl was getting really frustrated on the stream, is that the orbits are really, really frustrating on that game. Like, the upper orbit on the right seems to never go around, and the left one, which sees the upper right, comes so quick, you have zero chance of using it. Like, you can't see that area as it is, and if it actually goes around cleanly, it's going to come so fast that even if you had a clear view of it, you're not going to be able to see it and flip it at the right time. So it's just very... I know. Okay. So, obviously, you know, we talked last week that I went to the Southern Hemisphere and, you know, the campfire talk as well. I've got to tell you, the number one question people ask me, because apparently I'm some expert because I've got a podcast, right? It's written down somewhere. It's actually just one of the perks that comes with it. People do actually ask your opinion and it's kind of weird because people actually listen to the opinion and go, yeah, okay, I agree now. It's like, okay, it was just me. But the number one question people asked me was, is Willy Wonka any good? And my answer to them has been this. It is so much better than I thought it was going to be. And I think, I like the layout. Now, I know that that orbit shot is frustrating, but I'm also of the belief that the ramp shot for Deadpool is what makes that game. And you and I have spoken about that before, because if every shot was just very easy, well, it just becomes a bit sort of boring, I guess. And the challenge isn't there. You want one or two shots that are a lot harder than everything else. And so that shot, obviously, is the ramp shot for Deadpool. And I also think it's the orbit shot for Willy Wonka. But it's like both the orbits. Like, the left orbit... The left orbit is easy to hit. It's just hard to do anything with. But getting that right upper orbit is so hard. And that's how you get the Wonkvator. Yeah, which is the main feature in the game. But also, like, the way it feeds... And the way you feed it is via the left kicker and then grabbing the magnet. And, like, he was having tons of issues with the magnet not catching it if it actually went through the upper orbit, like it's supposed to, it goes too quick, and in one of the modes, it catches it. One of the modes, it purposely is always trying to get you to that flipper, which is cool, where the middle ramp, the upper orbit, and then the upper left orbit all feed that area that then puts you back down there, and then you're supposed to hit the spinner. But the magnet wasn't strong enough to grab the ball in a lot of those situations. So it was like, because it was going, if you hit it too hard, it just flies through into the magnet. It just goes right past the magnet. I guess it's supposed to be, you know, Carl was pretty sure that it was supposed to be grabbing it. But I mean, I don't know. But, and also it's just like the right, the right orbit, I mean, not the right orbit, the right ramp just seems that the game doesn't have strong enough flippers to hit it by default. Yeah, everyone has complained about the strength of the flippers. And it's one of those things where you need to actually You have a really good power supply going to the machine, and you also need to go into the settings and turn the flipper power right up to enjoy that game. But, yeah, and that's what he did. He turned up the power on all of them, and all of a sudden the game shot completely different and looked like it was... But I still don't know what's going on with that game, even watching that stream. No, I know. But, you know, if you think about that, I think it's got a complicated rule set, and to actually have all of those pieces come together takes time and I think all of a sudden you'll have this moment where version 9.95 I don't know what version they're up to obviously will come out and it's the rug that ties the room together. Just pretending that I don't know about that. But that's what I think will happen. I think the layout for me is actually a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be. Now it's just up to the code to take advantage of, I say take advantage, but play to the strengths of the layout and make you as a player feel that it's more intuitive to play. Yeah, and I think that unfortunately that even that the flip unless the flippers are dialed in the layout doesn't really shine at all. You're going to get so frustrated that you're not being able to hit these things. So hopefully that they ship with strong enough flippers where everything is easily hittable as it should be, because it seems that people don't actually change the settings once they have it. So, although I think that even if you own it and you're trying to shoot that right ramp, eventually you're going to have to cave and increase it, or else you're going to get really angry that it keeps going down the middle. Well, so, obviously we know dialed in was the same. I don't think Pirates of the Caribbean you needed to really fix the flippers from unboxing. But dialed in was certainly like that. And I remember there was a friend of mine, Eric, that I often stream at his place. In fact, I'm streaming this weekend at his place with my mobile rig for the first time. I still haven't unpacked it. And he had his dialed in for ages, and I streamed it and I just said, man, we've got to fix these flippers. You've got to increase the power. As soon as we did, he just went, oh my god, I can't believe how much more enjoyable this game is. Yeah, but getting people to that point and getting them to realize it, people won't do it. No, he didn't know to do it. So I've tried a couple of things. Yeah, I mean, one of my friends has one and I've tried to get him to turn the slipper scrape up and he thinks that he doesn't need it. And it's like, okay, but it's like... You're making the fun of the game. Yeah, I mean, you watch the stream that they did and like, man, now that dialed in played nice. that display, ooh, butter, like all those combos, hitting things on the fly and actually be able to hit the theater on the fly and hitting the left orbit and it goes to the upper flipper, like, what? That's a thing? Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, because I've yet to play a dialed in that does that. Right. Yeah, true. I haven't played Papa's. I didn't get a chance to play Papa's, but I assume theirs did. But, yeah, I mean, so, I mean, the final is just, I, obviously, it's a work in progress. I'm just a little worried about it from a theme point because mainly the game is the game and that's just going to be what it is and I'll like that for what it is but being attached to the theme I'm a little worried with how much theme is actually being there and how it's handled as a fanboy of the movie so I'm a little extra critical of that but where does that come from? where has JGP not faithfully integrated a theme? Um, from what I've heard, I think I haven't been able to play it in Pirates. No, Pirates is one of the best theme integrations. Well, I've heard that there's really not much actually from the movies in there. It's just kind of like, yeah, things from the movies are there, but... But the actual sense of it being a pirate theme and you actually being there and, you know, it, um, it, I don't know whether it did get the the trippy or it can run up or whatever it was but you know that that kind of stuff people did actually quite like and yes they didn't have all the assets and some people are going to be salty about that i understand it to a point with pirates because i know obviously that's a ridiculously expensive license i guess i don't know i just that i don't know what it is specifically about wonka but it's like i i don't want to feel like i'm in a chocolate factory i want to relive the moments from the movie. No, I don't want to be. I hear what you're saying, but that's the angle they've gone with. I know. You're actually in the chocolate factory and things sort of... But there's stuff there that dabbles in the other side. What is this about this joke? I know. I know people want to feel like they're in the movie. Well, fuck that's hard. And yet, you know, people always go, oh, well, you know, Lord of the Rings makes you feel like you're there. Okay. Did all the modes that you can select, do they all happen in sequence? No, it's impossible unless you happen to choose the modes specifically in the sequence they happened in the three movies. So how are you feeling that you're on this journey through Lord of the Rings? How? How is that even possible? you're not but the moments that they do make you feel like you're reliving that scene that's what they do so that's kind of I think what we're saying is missing here at the moment is you've got the whole you're in the chocolate factory and the display screen is you in sort of like the lab or whatever it is or the control room but each of those sort of different clips that are there, you're not feeling like you're reliving a moment in time of the movie. No, and I'm not, I don't, I think, um, I'm probably not being overly clear. Like, I don't need to feel like, I, my main thing is the, like, I want, like, I want to hear it. Like, I want to hear the Candyman song. I want to hear, you know, his, you know, imagination song when they enter the chocolate factory. It's like, I would just, I want to hear, like, the music and the songs from, because ultimately, I mean, I don't want to feel like I'm, like, but, like, hearing the iconic quotes and hearing the music, like, that's really all I want, as far as, like, the, I don't need to, like, feel like I'm part of that mode, like, I just want to hear those things, I want to hear Gene, I want to hear, you know, his song, and then I want to hear, like, the Candyman song, and it just, I want to experience those, not necessarily feel like I'm, like, a part of it, just that I want to hear it, I just want to hear those things I love from the movie. That's all. Not necessarily the like, I have to be in this order, and I have to feel like I'm on the, I'm inside the, you know, the Godstopper machine. I just want to hear Gene sing and stuff. But it's just a little, probably nostalgic thing for me. I don't know why I'm so attached to that theme. I haven't even seen it in that long, but I don't know. It's weird. See, that's themes. That's why people make games with themes. I know. It's emotional. This is the whole thing It's just so hard to get it right For everybody right Damn LCD's assets They do make They do make it much harder Absolutely no doubt And I don't even need to see it Just let me hear it Just sound Perfect Awesome So what else has been going on this week Nothing Shall we do Joe Joe tips the top 100 Shall we do that Sure Okay, you ready? And we got massive feedback from last week about this segment, so I think we should keep doing this. You ready? Yes, sir. Here we go. Okay, Google, pick a number between 1 and 100. 41. 41? Oh! Nice. Game of Thrones. Oh, wow. Which one, though? Do we talk a premium or pro? It's pro? I reckon go pro, and then maybe just call out the differences with the... Unless it like a radically new strategy that you would have with the premium and I mean they are pretty different but that also would allow if it ever gets re again we do the opposite Oh maybe that true Maybe we just start with the pro Start with the pro. With the pro! I just played the pro yesterday. Yes, it's Friday. So if you're stepping up to the machine in a comp, what are you trying to do? You're trying to pick Martel. Why Martel? Martell because Martell allows you to add a ball and restart your multiball in any of the multi-balls that includes Wall Wildfire and Blackwater and Hand of the King so the other modes have their own purposes some of them should never be picked ever like Zac Stark you should never play Baratheon Okay, can you just then step back then? The different houses, right? So for those people that don't know, unless, I don't know where it's called, like... Casual mode. Casual mode, thank you. And if it's just a normal setup, you get to pick a different house, and that house has different perks for the rest of the game. And... Want me to go over them? Well, I'd love you to go over them, but I just want to just say that over time, people have changed what they would do. And I remember it originally started, everyone was picking Martel. Then people were picking Greyjoy because that's the long game where you get points. And then the other one was, was it Tyrell with the multiplier? Yeah, some people still play Tyrell. So I'm curious to know, if you can go through all those different perks and what you know they do, and then why you would pick Martel over others. Okay, so Zac Stark, All Star's going to do is make that you start with a bigger base value for Winter is Coming, which is the hurry-up you get after you hit a shot three times. It's the strobing thing that nobody loves because it's really bright. Which, weirdly enough, it's way brighter on a Pro than a Premium, I noticed, after playing one yesterday. Way more distracting. So that's all that one does, which I don't see why you'd ever pick that. It's not worth that much. Lannister increases how much gold you get from missing so all those stand-ups that you hit that you also hit during their mode when you're playing it you're just going to get more gold from each of those than you would otherwise so in Greyjoy you get the powers of it allows you to earn the powers and make alliances with the other houses but the trade-off is that now when you complete the other houses they're all harder so it adds an extra two or three shots to the completion of all those those have a good deal of mode I think as well like one of them, I can't remember which one I always pick Greyjoy just for everybody pick Greyjoy when you don't have to put money in the machine and when you're not in a tournament because it's you do actually have to complete these modes to get the perk from the one that you would have originally picked. So, you know, when you talked about Lannister giving you all the gold, if you beat Lannister, you get that perk and you get more gold. So it is better for home games, but for tournaments when time can be limited and when they brutalize the machine, it's just too hard to get to that end stage. Yeah, no way. And like I mentioned, it adds... The modes become much harder to finish because not only do you have to finish the modes in what they are, you also have to finish the purple shots that are added to those modes before you'll get credit for it. So that's definitely a, if you're only looking to blow it up and you're going to live a long time and you don't want to see, odds of seeing the end of the game while playing Greyjoy, probably it's like twice as much work practically. So Tyrell, what Tyrell does is it will light in like, in Hand of the King, it is like an automatic perk because you see them flashing. But when you're playing Tyrell, one of the inlanes in your return lanes will be blinking. And if you have that lit as the ball goes through, your next shot will be doubled, I believe. So it's a huge comboing mode. So if you can hit tons of combos, you're going to get a lot of points out of it. but if you're not doing that, the reward for it is not as good as Martel, which can be worth untold amounts of points because you get to extend that multiball. So that time when you were in Blackwater and you didn't make it to Supers because you didn't have an addable, boom, now you're at Supers. So what is the value on that? It could be huge. Okay, so going back to what I said before, Why is it that people went from Martell to Tyrell, and why are they back at Martell? Because I remember... No, well, no, this was in tournaments. I remember in tournaments when it came out, people were picking Martell. Then they picked Tyrell. No one's ever really picked Greyjoy in a tournament. Okay, specifically in tournaments. But yeah, specifically in tournaments, they would use Tyrell, and I think it was because they're like, well, I can get quick points, right? Yeah, I think the big thing there is how hard the machine is. I think if you're not going to go for Blackwater, then you shouldn't pick Martel. If the game is too hard and you don't feel that you're going to live through those shots of the lock targets, and you're just going to shoot shots, then Tyrell is a better mode to pick. Because if you're just going to avoid the lock shot and you're just going to shoot shots, then Tyrell, at least you're going to get extra points for that. So if you're just going Tyrell and the game has no outlane posts and a super tight tilt and no rubbers, maybe Tyrell makes sense. If you think that no one's going to get to Blackwater or if you're just not going to go for Blackwater and you're choosing not to take that path, then Tyrell is the best choice for you. If you're going to go for Blackwater and you want to get the most out of your Blackwater and that's going to be your scoring moment, then you should go Martel. and you know sort of back to basics as well with to get black water multiball effectively you need to hit the two are they wildfire targets on the right side? They're green I remember they're green if you hit them both then they light your wildfire hurry up right okay to get multiball ready usually on default setting you can just hit either one of those targets on the right, and then you go up the middle to lock a ball, these locks aren't stackable, so you've got to then come back down, hit one of those targets and go back up. If it's been set to a harder lock difficulty, it will make you hit both of those targets either at the same time or separately to light a lock, but also if it is on normal and you can just do one target, once you've had multiple to do it again, it's harder, so you then got a light individual. So you do one, two, three, and then bang, Blackwater starts. Now, what I want you to explain now is, how do you get the super in Blackwater? Okay, and one I forgot to mention of the houses is Baratheon, which I believe gives you spinner scoring. Increases your spinner scoring if you pick them. Again, I've never seen anyone pick it. I've never done it myself. Who knows? Maybe I'll try it next time. And you can't start with Targaryen. So as far as the supers, pretty much after you hit all five shots, the super will be lit at the battering ram and then you hit it and you hope it registers. That's how supers work. Yeah, and you are making a funny point, but that battering ram is one of you would call it out as being one of the most unreliable mix, because sometimes you can hit it absolutely dead on and it just doesn't register. It's almost as notorious as the zombie in the prison for Walking Dead. That should always be disabled, yeah. The thing that pisses me off most about this game, about that battering ram, and I don't know if it's a bug or just something, but you will hit it, it will register, make a sound, and not give you the super jackpot. Like, that happens constantly. I don't know what that is, I don't know why that's happening, but it's like, I hit you, you went, you went, or you made the, like, the sound, but you didn't give me the super jackpot. Like, how is those, how are those two things not, like, so, I don't get that, I don't know what that means, or why it does that, but, yeah, so, and I believe your supers are the value of the five jackpots that you cashed in. Right, now, and the other thing that that is probably worth mentioning here as well, is sort of multipliers. So if you can talk about the swords and what you need to do with those to be able to increase your score. Before we move on to that, one big thing that most people don't know about Blackwater Multiball is that, so on base, Blackwater Multiball is worth, I want to say 500k each of the jackpots without getting any wildfire, you can increase that by a large margin if you take the time to do so. So if you hit both of the lock targets on the right, both of them, it'll light a green insert at the battering ram. It says wildfire. So if you hit that, it'll start a hurry up or a mini scoring round. So what that does is when you hit it the first time, it's going to give you 10 wildfire. If you hit it the next time, it's going to give you 9 wildfire, 8, 7, 6, 5. So it's diminishing returns. But the wildfire it gives you has huge implications. So say you hit that thing three times, twice, maybe just twice. All of a sudden your jackpots are, instead of 500K, are like 1.5 million or 2 million. You hit it like three times, now they're up to three million. So now if you take that, if you take the time to do that before you, also, while you're doing this, you're increasing the playfield multiplier you mentioned. So you might go into Blackwater with a 2x playfield multiplier, three if you go deep into it, and then all of a sudden all of those jackpots are a much bigger base, and they're all being multiplied by various different combos. So your supers, instead of being like $20 million, $30 million, which I think is roughly where you end up about base, you get like $75, $90 million supers per. Because you took that time before you went into the multiball to build up your base value of your jackpots, which can be huge. And those aren't even like really potentially even multiplied. You can get into hundreds of millions with big multiplied stuff. Well, that's good to hear because I didn't know about wildfire, so what I've known is that sometimes I get into multiball and I look up my screen and I'm at 600 mil, sometimes I'm at 200 mil. I've never been able to know why I've been able to increase it so much. Yeah, because one is if you don't hit both of the targets, you can easily light all three of your locks by just hitting one of those targets and never hitting the other one. So you might never even see that on. I didn't overly understand why that would light sometimes until eventually I figured it out. And then also you can tend to get Wildfire as random awards inside the bumpers. It tends to give you like five at a time. So if you get that a few times, you're getting kind of the background benefit of that that you might not necessarily notice. And then all of a sudden you start noticing, hey, this Blackwater is worth a lot more. Why is that? Because you got a couple awards in the pop bumpers. so yeah it can make a massive difference for sure it like doubles or triples what you pull out of that multipole so it's definitely worth investing in so then let's talk about the playful multiplier and you know the power of the sword okay so um I think I have this right but don't hold me to it but um you get swords so I believe that the highest that the multiplier can go to base without doing anything or collecting swords is a 3x combo multiplier. I believe you're correct. Um, and if you beat a mode, it lights a sword at the right ramp. At the right ramp. And if you collect that sword, I believe it increases your multiplier up one? Correct. Just for that ball. It's just for that ball. Okay, I didn't realize it was just for that ball. Um, so, yeah, so then if you beat multiples, and also I've noticed that it's random what sword it gives you. So when it gets multiplied, you can get a really crappy sword that's worth nothing, or you can get a really big sword that's worth like 50 million. You're like, whoa! But yeah, that's how you light swords. So you should always collect swords when they're available because it does open up how big your multipliers go. And that also increases what your Tyrell possibilities are as well, I believe. So really all they're doing is they're taking the limit off the maximum multiplier you can have. Correct, and that also increases your playfield multiplier maximum because I believe that you can only get 3x and then if you get a sword, you can get 4, get a second sword, you can get up to 5. That's correct. So then, there are other multi-balls to go for. The first one is wall multiball. Talk to me about that. Yes. Which, in general, is rather garbage, But wall multiball, which I believe the way that it's implemented in the pro compared to the premium, makes me not like the pro. So on the pro, the way to get to wall is grinding upper lanes. So what that means is you're going to be backhanding or forehanding the spinner over and over and over. It's so boring to watch. Yes, it is very boring to watch. So that's how you get into wall, and then you have to hit the dragon shot to start wall. And in that multiball, pretty much you're hitting, it goes from the ramps, hitting three in a row, then hitting the dragon, and then I think hitting orbits three in a row, then the dragon, and then it alternates back and forth. And eventually it gets, if you play for long enough, it's worth some kind of points. but in general it's not that it used to be worth a lot and they nerfed it because it was so easily attainable that they made it a lot less lucrative which is weird which sucks because on the premium to get wall you have to pound the dragon which is a lot harder of a shot it's a lot more risky and I mean honestly on the premium I never get wall because I never go for it and it never happens on accident It's like, well, yeah, and that's kind of really the summary for all multiball is, if you happen to get close, sure, go for it. For me, it's like graveyard multiball on Metallica. It's like, I'm not going to actively go for those inline drop targets, but if I happen to get three of them down and there's only two more shots, I'll go for it, but it's not something that I'm actively going to go for. Yeah, and it's weird. I wish that, and there's certainly no reason that they couldn't swap that on the pro to make it so that it's not like that. Because it slows the game down. It's super grinding. For example, in that golf tournament I mentioned I was in last week, the score was 100 million. So I just played Martel, got it. Like seven shots. Joshua Henderson happened to be in town, and he played it, and he just grinded walls for 10 minutes. Right. To get the same accomplishment, he did 50 shots worth instead of my five. But it's like, because it was safe, people do it. Yeah. So that's what it degrades into. And it's just like, I wish that's easy enough to change. That goes here. Done. It's not like there's anything in the play field that prevents them from doing so. So I wish that maybe in the future, maybe they'd do that. But I doubt it. So, yeah, that's the other multiball, the other main multiball. Well, and there's one other, but besides what we talk about, you know, Hand of the King and Iron Phone, there is one other multiball. And I wanted to call this out because nobody ever goes for it. because it's not necessarily worth that many points and because it's such a grind to get there, and that's really why, but I think it's one of the most fun multiballs. And that is Winter Has Come. Yes, I think it's really fun. It's so fun. I almost forgot about that when you were talking. I was sitting there going, what the hell is he talking about? He ain't talking about Castle, because we're only talking about the Pro. But yeah, Winter Has Come, which is really fun. I got to it yesterday. which is super blinding on a pro. Oh my god. It's so blinding on the pro. But it's also blinding on the premium melee. But not as bad. I don't know why the pro is so brighter. But anyway. So yeah, you get that by completing four Winter Has Come. Which is each shot you have to hit. So whatever house you're playing, say you're playing Martell. You're going to start the game and the Martell shield is going to be you know, of whatever your color. So when you hit the other shots, yeah, orange. So, although I don't think it starts that way because you can get winter's come on your own shot, so that's not necessarily true. But when you hit, it's when you do finish a mode, that shield, which was the original color, so let's say it was orange, and, you know, you're trying to qualify for that mode, it then goes like an ice blue, and then when you hit that shot, well, Well, yeah, but if there's multiple shields up there that are the winter has come shields, you can combo them and whichever one is the last one will then lock that one in for winter is coming shot. Yeah, which I noticed that yesterday when I was playing. I'm like, well, I thought that I backhanded the left one twice and then I hit the middle one and it started there. I was like, hey, I thought it was per. And it's really frustrating when you're going for the middle ramp because it's so safe, and then you miss your shot, and then it hits the wildfire targets on the right, and all of a sudden it's locked in the most dangerous shot in the game, and you're like, oh, damn. And when you have got winter is coming, that final shot, the rest of the game shuts down. It's literally all that shot that's all you've got to do. But you can time it out, but anyway. The rest of the game is still happening. It's just off. All the visuals are off. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, as you said, once you get four of those completed, it then starts, winter has come, multiple. And forget about what you're doing. What's the fun thing that happens in winter has come, multiple? Your flippers freeze. Which, the first time that happened, I was like, what? What the fuck? I was pissed at first, and then immediately like, this is freaking awesome. It's so cool. The white walker grabbed me, and I'm frozen, and then you have to play that way. It's really cool. It's a really clever concept. It's so much fun. It is only for home play. Do not ever attempt Winter Has Come multiball in a tournament. Please don't. Well, you know what? It'd be fine if, like, a lot of multi-balls like this where there's flipper mess-up stuff that's going on, if it gave a ball save at the end of it to make sure that you didn't lose a ball. Well, that's what this does. So Winter Has Come multiball, when it freezes your flipper, it will put a multiball, a ball save on but we'll only do that a couple of times because it only free, it doesn't always freeze. You've actually, do you know what it's like? It's like Horde in The Walking Dead in that if you shoot your major shots, you will keep going but if you keep bricking, eventually they will come to you, grab you and freeze the flipper. So you can avoid that moment if you just hit your shots but it's fun when you don't because it just fucks with your head. It's so good. Yeah, like once it's over and you go down to one ball play, like I wish that it would just like if you lose the ball at that moment, it's like, hey, no, continue playing. Like it shuts the game out, gets the ball, and starts you fresh because sometimes if you happen to lose them right when that flipper's still not working and they're like, ah, like that's the only thing. If they put that in, then I'd say go for it in tournaments. I mean, it is decent points, and it's pretty easy to get to, because all you're doing is grinding and hitting the same shot three times, which isn't so bad. Well, I wouldn't go for it as a goal, but if you're close... No, I know you say that it's the same shot that you could do three times, but you've got to pick four different shots. And, you know, I always go for the center ramp first, easy, because it's the easiest shot in the game. I might then try my second one as being either the left or the right orbit. Yeah, that's what I say. You lift the right orbit and then the right ramp, which is easily backhandable on the Pro. Sometimes. For the most part, it is. Or it's the dragon, or it's the... Definitely not the dragon. No, definitely not the dragon, and definitely not the left or the right targets. Yeah, the left. I mean, if they happen. Sometimes they'll happen, but don't go for them on purpose. So it's usually one of the four that you have to get that becomes hard. That's true. So then talk to me about Hand of the King. All right, Hand of the King. So the main, I don't know 100% all the various different variables, but I know the main ones I try and get and the ones I try not to bring in. So the way Hand of the King works is you have to complete four houses, and then it lights the middle ramp, which then starts Hand of the King. A couple things to have in your head when you're doing this is, if you're playing Martell, you kind of want to go into Hand of the King with your add-a-ball intact. So for people who don't know, Martell's power is add a ball to a multiball once per ball. So in best-case scenario, you kind of want to use maybe ball one, use it for Blackwater, maybe ball two, use it for you know, Hand of the King and or Blackwater and then save it. You try not to do Blackwater and Hand of the King on the same ball unless obviously it's your first ball then sure, why not? But I mean it's a massive it's probably the biggest scoring opportunity in the game so it might be worth holding off on to make sure you can extend it. So just to keep that in mind. So the upper, my optimal path that I try and do when going into Hand of the King is to bring in Lannister, Greyjoy, Tyrell, and Zac Stark. So, Greyjoy and Lannister, everyone should play both of those when they play their Blackwater. Hopefully you complete them both. Tyrell you play second to try and get to a second Blackwater, because you're going to be hitting those lock targets, so hopefully if you're playing that mode well and completing it, you're probably at a second Blackwater. Zac Stark, I just play to get it over with. So that's just hit three rams, hit an orbit, done. That's right. Don't even try and get it up to maximize your points. Just move it on as quick as you can. Exactly. So then you get those four done. So what that does is, I believe Tyrell's power is, it makes you only have to hit each shot once, which is hugely important because it gets you to the super quicker. although I believe that the super is worth whatever the points you hit are so I guess it does half the size of the super but I'd rather just get the subsequent supers Zac Stark gives you the power that after you hit your first super you get 20 seconds of bonus time so it lights all the shots and then you can just keep hitting them for 20 seconds and then it'll go back into the Hand of the King cycle during that time you tend to, if you can, just cycle the middle ramp don't get fancy with it because you want to protect yourself to make sure you get to the second phase I don't remember what Greyjoy and Lannister's purpose is during this, mainly they make it whatever houses you bring into it also determine what shots are lit so in this set you're hitting the left orbit which is the easiest shot in the game, and then you're at the middle ramp second easiest, the right ramp, there you go, and then the lock. So those are your four shots during Hand of the King, all of them as easy as they can be for the most part. So that's what you want to do with those. If you, Martel, if you bring Martel in, Martel, I don't know if it's the power that it's specifically Martel, or it's the lack of Tyrell, I'm not 100% sure, but whenever you bring Martel into Hand of the King, you have to hit every shot twice. Which sucks. I wouldn't recommend it. I believe Targaryen adds an extra 15 million per shot. So if somehow you can finish Targaryen before you get to the Hand of the King, congratulations. But I believe that that's what that does. I'm not sure what Baratheon does. If I had to guess, it increases something to do with the spinner because that's all that Baratheon tends to do. So the big thing in Hand of the King is that you want to hit your cycles. You want to get through your Zac Stark. Get as many points as you can in there. Obviously, have your addable if you can. But the second super is the big super, comparatively to the first one. The first one might be a couple hundred million. The second super is like 500 million. Right. It'd be really huge. And if you can get to the third one, even huger. So really, Hand of the King is the biggest scoring opportunity in the game, outside of, obviously, Iron Throne. Right. And so Iron Throne, no one's going to get through it. I mean, you see it on occasion, but that's effective. you've got to finish all modes to be able to get to Iron Throne. I've got to it once. Yeah, I have once. But super fun. And this is what's so great about Game of Thrones. It seems quite complicated, but now that you've got Star Wars as the new normal, as far as complicated goes, you look back and you go, yep, I love the fact that I've got all these options ahead of me. But, you know, we talked about things like Winter Has Come multiball. They've actually made each of the major moments fun as well as being good scoring opportunities. Yeah, and I've always found it kind of weird that people think that this is a really complicated game. Like, it's kind of like the multiplayer as in Star Wars. It's only really complicated if you want to make it complicated. No, that's right. You don't need to. It's not that complicated. No, and that's exactly right. Because people go, oh my God, I've got all these houses to choose from. Oh my God, what do I choose? And I was like, fucking just pick Martel. Do this. So what it's saying is that you've actually got all these options, but the path forward is simple because you're ignoring all the complexity that happens around it. Yeah, and I guess the modes are kind of thematic. They're very, very limited to what is actually in there. Like Iron Throne actually ends up being the most thematic part of the game because you get to go through all of the major castles in Westeros, which is really cool if you watch the show. So you literally have to conquer every castle in Westeros. It's like 20, 30 of them. It's crazy. Super fun. And it's also very unique, and I'm not sure other wizard modes do this outside of maybe Encore, which is its own three-ball game, which is like the best mode ever created. But on Iron Throne, once you get to Iron Throne, it stays until you complete it on subsequent balls. So if you get saved, you get there on ball one. Your ball two and your ball three are in Iron Throne until you complete it or die. Okay. Which is pretty cool. Okay. All right. Well, there you go. There you go. There you go. So that was Game of Thrones. Thank you very much. Joe tipped the top 100. What an absolute winner. And I'm so glad it was Game of Thrones because it's just one of my favorite games. I streamed it here at my house for probably six months and just loved playing it. And, you know, we're talking about... It's a great game. Sometimes I play Martel, sometimes I play Tyrell, sometimes I play, well, most of the time I play Greyjoy because at home it's just fun being able to have, as rewards, all the other different houses' perks. That in itself was kind of these mini rewards that you get. Do you own one? I used to. I used to, well, I actually half-owned it with Ryan. We went in on it together and then... Did you lose it in a divorce? Yeah, kind of. Well, before the... But so, we talked about Star Wars before. I, just a bit of a segue into what's happened this week in my life. So I went to a tournament last night. You built a Death Star? Ha ha! So I went to Reality Games monthly match play. And I've got to thank you, Joe LeBien. Because... You're welcome. Star Wars. The layer strat. It worked. It's a fucking winner. Isn't it? It's a winner unless you get into a mode too quickly. Well, why'd you pick a mode? Because I'm an idiot. No, I absolutely should. But how do you accidentally pick a mode? Oh, I just... Well, I probably should have passed. Were you rushing, Mo? I probably should have passed, shouldn't I? Yeah. Always pass. Yay. Unless it... Well, yeah, you always pass unless you've lit them all and then you go in and you play your video mode and all that stuff. Yeah. Anyway, you didn't. I didn't, but it got me enough to get through. But what was really interesting, so there was 32 players, it was capped at 32 players, and there were A, B, C, D divisions, and 8, 8, 8, and 8. And after seven rounds, so yeah, there was one game per round, I was equal eighth, or equal seventh. So there was three of us that were equal seventh, so we then had to do a playoff, and I had played so badly, But luckily on my last game I won, which put me into that tiebreaker. And, you know, the two of us got through into the top eight. So that was great. The top eight, which then became top four, I comfortably got through the top eight into the top four. But I then ended up as a tiebreaker to win this match last night. and what we decided to do was because there was a choice of either randomising the games. I think there was probably about 15, 16 games to choose from. But what we decided was that I would pick a game, Stu, the other person that I was playing against, picked a game, flip a coin, whoever got it, their machine was chosen. He chose Transformers. I chose Avatar. And not just any Avatar. I'd be fine with either of those games. Well, sure. But this avatar... Was an LE. It was an LE. Oh, shit. And the... Was the ball still in it? Nope. The Navi ball had been taken out. Oh, good. But not only that... I guess it was normal. It had been brutalized. I mean, fucking brutalized. So it played really snappy. But all the outlaying rubbers were off. The tilt was set ridiculously tight, so you could barely move it. so I thought, you know what, I'm going to go Avatar because I will destroy on this unfortunately his machine was selected and it was on Transformers and on my third ball I may have had I don't know, maybe 5 million and Stu was on 9 million but luckily on my last ball I managed to put up 44 million except that by the end I actually tilted my game in a multiple what sort of idiot does that? An Australian one? Yeah. But I was sitting there thinking, and I know you can never think to yourself, you're safe. Because I always think, if I can go from five million to a last ball of adding another 40 million, so can somebody else. Absolutely. Only takes one ball. And that's what they did. So I came second. It was still a lot of fun. And I came second. I think it finished at like 1.30 in the morning. It was just so... I know. You messaged me at like 1 in the afternoon I'm like, what are you doing up? I know But it was fun And you know what? The better player won Awesome, Stu Oh, look at you Yeah That's the thing Was it a pro? Was it a pro, Transformers? No I'm sorry No But I don't know which one it was Whether it was the Whatever the L.E. is The color is. Stupid play. I hate that play field. It's like the worst toy at pinball. Back to the Avatar part. It's funny that we... Most people look at Avatar as just this dick of a game that's so mean. But then you get into tournaments and it's so brutalized. Because if you can get a hold of that game, it can go for a long time. It's actually very controllable. I hated that game when I started playing. And now I really like that game because it is really controllable and it's not as mean as it seemed when you first played it. And that's why they have to do that, because it plays for a long time, actually. So I've always compared it to Iron Man, and I know people will kill me for saying that because you can't compare them. It's the same era. They came out one after the other. They're both part of the same... Yeah, so it's got a very similar rules framework in that you've got to complete everything on the one ball. But it's possible on Iron Man. I have actually gotten to the wizard mode on Avatar when I streamed probably about a year ago. But what I like about it, and it's just what I like about Iron Man, is that it can be really quite torturous. It can be quite brutal. the objective you've got to do by doing it in any one ball means at least you understand what you need to do. The rules are deeper than Ironman. A little bit. You wouldn't say a lot, but with like Na'vi scoring and all that kind of stuff, people don't really know what that means to get the Na'vi multiball, but its downside really is it's only got one round. So there's that. And it's got those poppets. game is underrated. Yeah, that's the biggest thing. Like, the pops down the middle, if they wanted to, they could easily patch that. All it needs is the new ball save rules where it's like, hey, if it's in the pop bumpers, once it leaves, that's when ball save starts. The biggest problem is that ball save ends while you're in the pop bumpers. You take that away, it's easily fixable. They could easily fix that if they wanted to. Well, Joe Lemire, I am so impressed with you saying that you think it's underrated because I get so much flack for saying that I like Avatar. And in my defense, I actually really like the movie. So that's probably another thing I could pick. I really like the movie too. Yeah, that's another one that history has decided it sucked, but at the time it didn't. I'm looking forward to the next four that are coming out in six months each. So I've got a bit of an affinity to it because I like the theme. I love the call-outs. I love the things. I understand it's not necessarily the best game, so I get why people don't like it. but for me, I find it a very enjoyable game. Really, its shortcoming is it's all about that bloody Jake shot, you know, the chamber, whatever it is, and once you link, thank you, get link multiball, make sure you get your multiplier on it, repeat, repeat, repeat, that ruins the rest of the game. Yeah, but I mean, that's another thing that could easily be fixed too. I mean, the reason that is the way it is is because that super is so huge. Yeah. you reduce that super, all of a sudden it's not going to be that. You increase, make Amp more worth more. I mean, that game has a lot... I mean, I've never really gone for the wizard mode because the other things are so prominent and really, if you're just playing for fun, you can go for those other things. But, like, with some... And, like, people complaining about that game, I mean, it was a product of its day. I mean, Iron Man back then was hated as well, even more so, I think. So it's like, yeah, revisitor's history. And I think that people now appreciate Avatar. and honestly, I think that once the movie's come out, I think Avatar will be vaulted. I think it's going to happen. Okay. And with some polish in there, some rule balancing, I think that I don't see any reason, if Iron Man gets vaulted, I don't see why Avatar couldn't get vaulted. Well, but Iron Man became popular before they vaulted. Avatar is yet to have that happen. I mean, I think it's still popular. I mean, there's a lot less of avatars than there are Iron Mans, too. Yeah, probably. And, I mean, everyone I know loves the game. Okay. And there's a lot of them around here, and most people I know like Avatar. So, I don't know. Well, I need to meet these people, because I've yet to meet another person that likes Avatar. Well, you're surrounded by shitty people, man. That game's fun. Okay. stuff. I mean, come on, what's his name? I can't remember the actor's name, but the person who plays him, stop shaking my game. It's just like some of the best call-outs in Bimble. I don't know.