And it's a good joke, right? You know, it's kind of a funny joke. But the idea that you had pressed start and that the game had served you a ball and that you had then had the temerity not to launch that ball onto the playfield. Yep. After a certain amount of time, you are the butt of that joke. And it'll say, you got to talk or you got to fish? And that was where that line came from. To me, when I got to 1991 or whenever that was, that was an old joke for me, right? And that was about as much about fishing as I knew, right? Yeah. But I'm like, okay, God, we're going to make a fishing game. Don't you just like sit under a tree and fall asleep? Is that fun? And then I walked in one day and I saw the words on his whiteboard, stretch truth when lit. And I'm like, oh, this isn't a game about fishing. This is a game about lying. And I'm like, OK, now I understand. And that's so how big was it? You know, was was obviously a big, you know, part of the central rules of that game. And those things came about in a very, very organic way, you know, where it's like, OK, fishing game. What's on a fishing game? What happens when you fish? And those were a couple of things that happened. We pieced together all the rules of that game in a very, very organic way. And I'm like, so country music, right? And Mark goes, bluegrass, man. I'm like, oh, dude, you know, and I'm like, you know, I can fake anything, but I'm not faking that. You know, that's what, you know, when I play, I play the six string flat pick Martin guitar and an eight string mandolin. And that's what I, those are my instruments, you know, typically don't, I can't play fast enough to call it bluegrass, but I love, love, love that music. That Yamaha can play very, very fast. You may have noticed. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you notice. We can do very, very virtuosic sounding things with a synthesizer that mere mortals like me, you know, who's, you know, the arthritis is kicking in at this point and there's no hope for me to ever play that fast. You know, really, really good time. But a better answer to your question is more like the process that I went through with Pat on every one of Pat's games. And that was, OK, Chris, time to talk about the sound package. Bring your notebook. And I would go in and he would start going, OK, here's the game. See the game, see all the shots, see all the things that you can do. The theme of the game is this. I'll start you at the beginning. The ball gets launched and I want the music to be, you know, for Earthshaker, it was, you know, some kind of like a, some kind of a basic, some kind of a, you know, just like a road trip rock and roll, you know, kind of a vibe. That's where we started. And he goes, OK, so then you launch the ball. You know, I want to hear a car, you know, pulling, peeling out and pulling away. So that's what we get. He would go through the entire game, all of the rules that he had thought of and talk me through every piece of it. And I would be writing down, OK, you know, I need this sound for that. I need something that stretches across this gap. I need a piece of music that's doing this. Here's the big show that takes me to the next sort of place. The first thing that I have is I have a list of rules and a description of all of Pat's little choreographic notes that he's thought of so far. So I start with there and then he goes, OK, now let's look at every switch in the game. And we start and go through and say, OK, ball launch, you know, and shooter groove, you know, ball present, you know, switch. What sounds are associated with those things? And typically we get through most of the things that are just like are common on every pinball game. That's a list that, you know, something where I'm going to compose a unique object for each one of these switches that does a particular thing. A lit return lane, an unlit return lane, lit out lane, unlit out lane. Ramp entrance, ramp complete switch. Spinner optos. Ball catchers, the vertical upward kicker. Vux that Stern called them. I think Williams just called them kickers. Casting club element at Fishtails is one of those kickers, right? Obviously, the fishing reel itself, Mark's catapult reel, you know, catapult mechanism that he invented for Road Kings for big guns and then used over and over and over again, you know, used that a lot. Each one of those switches then sort of represented a sound that was going to be made as well. So at that point, we've got most of the rules that the game designer has to start with and all of the switches and all of the common sounds that we're going to need for the whole package. And I always like to start with the music first and just set the tone of the game and also make sure I'm on the right page, you know, with the designer and any kind of revisions that need to be done. If I get off on a foot that wasn't quite what he was thinking and we ended up having to, you know, have a conversation about that, you know, then we do that. What was your sort of like you worked with the same designers multiple times? Was it one of those things where it became like you got to know them pretty well and then your sort of, let's say, hit rate went up over time? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, no question about it. And they got better at asking me for stuff, knowing what I could do, right? I don't know if you want to get to the taxi question now. I can talk a little bit about that if you want. We can wait. Just to say that Mark is like, when he first started working on that play field, I thought it was going to be a Grand Prix game because he was going to have those cool figure eight ramps and we were going to have this great sort of racetrack theme or whatever. And Python came in and just sort of shat all over that idea. He just thought it was a really boring, stupid idea. And it's been, you know, racing games, been done a million times. He's like, it's boring, man. Don't do that. You know, let's do let's let's let's be in a taxi and you're driving in a taxi cab and you're picking up strange passengers, man. You know, you're picking up Pinball as a passenger and you're picking up Dracula from the Cyclone game and and and some other people as well. You know, and and that was kind of like, oh, man, you've got to be kidding me. Again, it was like taxi driving, you know, driving in traffic. Is that supposed to be fun or something like that? I don't know. So I didn't, I really had a bad attitude about it at the beginning. And Mark goes, you know, Mark loved the idea, of course. And he's like, Chris, it'll be fine, man. Just write me some Little Feet music. And I'm like, oh, well, yes, I could do that. You know, so he didn't. So I didn't write Little Feet music. I, you know, I wrote my own music. But I, you know, Little Feet was at the time, it was absolutely my favorite band. And so just that whole kind of like country with a boogie beat, kind of a style, that very easy shuffle, obviously needed to have a very cool, Rhythm guitar passage and that was right away I started to think about that problem and started to solve that problem. That was the beginning of the tune that I still think is my favorite tune, that main taxi tune. It has so many good elements in it. It has so many things that I love about music in general and particularly about that chip and what you could do with it and just how just effortlessly beautiful a simple little piece of music could be. Really kind of all came together for that, you know, in that particular tune, you know, very much so. I want to bring up your influences as a musician because, yeah, I've heard you talk lovingly about that taxi main theme and that it was, you know, Mark had encouraged you probably because you guys were friends at this point and he knew you well. And he's like, hey, give me a little feat. Give me some little feat. Yeah, exactly. And you're like, yeah, I got you. Or like how Mark's like, again, bluegrass for fishtails, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I've also heard you call your soundtrack for Whitewater your Bruce Hornsby period. Are there any other pieces of your work that you remember being particularly influenced by other musicians that you can tell us about? Probably the biggest one and the one that doesn't get nearly as much credit these days, but some of the clips that you sent over for me to review, sort of lean to this a little bit, is Scott Joplin and Ragtime. And I used to play that stuff. I used to play a little Scott Joplin. And the thing that's great about Joplin is that capturing the essence of that rhythm is a very, very simple thing. Once you understand what the kind of like how the building blocks are of what you're doing and doing something that has that dum-ching, dum-ching, dum-ching, dum-ching, dum-ching, you know, bass left hand sort of form. And then a kind of a... I just made that up. That's what Ragtime is, you know, is those two things combined. You know, obviously, Fire was a, you know, was the place where we really got started, you know, with it in a big way. But then right down through my catalog, you'll find me, you know, reaching for that kind of like stride piano, kind of old timey, well, Ragtimey piano forms all through, you know, it's featured prominently in Adam's family, very prominently. And then it's like all over Twilight Zone. That's very definitely, you know, something that I that I reach for. And all of the kind of like, you know, maybe you call it trad jazz, you know, New Orleans jazz or something like that. That kind of writing, you know, always really, really appealed to me. And, you know, those forms, those, you know, classic 32 bar song forms and stuff like that. 12 bar blues, all those kinds of things, you know, that fit into this kind of like, you know, I didn't I was never like a really big, like a kind of a bluesy guy. I'm not a big buddy guy guy or people like that, but the blues form pervades popular music of all different genres. Just doing something that's got the 12-bar blues form is a tried and true way to get something down when you don't have any better idea for something that it should be. Musical forms, they have very distinct sorts of language that they paint for the listener, put the listener in a particular kind of a place. You know, all of the all the things that the pop music is and that classical music is as well are things where where that's really what we're after. I was fortunate to, you know, go through a very forward looking kind of avant garde experimental music program at at at Urbana at University of Illinois. And we learned about abstract expressionism. We learned about, you know, really crazy stuff and people, composers who went around saying, who cares if you listen? Well, I care. That was something that I didn't exactly subscribe to that school of thought around integral serial blah, blah, blah. The academic cats in the 50s and 60s really got themselves into a state, that whole notion of doing it because there was a form to it or that there was a structure to it that allowed these composers to do all these kind of really wacky things. To me, they just sounded wacky. And, you know, if you like wacky, that's cool. You know, if you're going to do wacky music like that, you should probably like it. And I did like wacky music, but I wasn't particularly interested in like in the structures, organized the wackiness. That wasn't what it was about for me. I just thought, oh, that was like that was an interesting, unusual, strange and weird sound. You know, if you play that, then, you know, maybe they let that ring in the space for a minute. And what's the next thing you think of? And and so my my like student works and things like that, you know, tended to be much more kind of like intuitive and with simple forms and simple, simple harmonic structures compared to what many of my my student colleagues were doing, you know. But I did like I did enjoy the occasional, you know, just like super goofy, you know, sound and strange chords and things like that. And so when I stumbled into those things, you know, whether it was by mistake or whether I would say, I wonder if this thing will work. And I'd try it out and I'd go, oh, wow, that was a little weird. That's not what I thought. Play around with it a little bit and see if I could turn it into something cool. It taught you to be experimental. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. So so there was a you know, that was something that I learned from, you know, just from the environment that I was in, you know, in school. Right That I managed to carry with me you know really just it was fortunate for me And I believe that it was fortunate for the industry that people that were there that were my primary audience which were the game designers and programmers at Williams had a positive initial response to something that was unfamiliar that they didn hate it because it was unfamiliar You know, the very tippy top of the best at that was Eugene Jarvis, but right down through Steve Ritchie, who was much more of a traditionalist than, you know, than he would ever admit, I think. He was somebody who liked what he liked. Things were going to be that kind of hard-edged, guitar-oriented rock with Steve pretty much right out of the gate. That's no longer true. Now that we're doing licensed games all the time, Steve's games have orchestral music in them and songs. He just did a whole Elton John game, right? He can do a lot of other stuff, but when he was the king of pinball, he liked it the way he liked it. And so we got High Speed and we got Getaway and we got Terminator and we got those things, you know. But then again, we also got Star Trek, right? Next Generation. Yeah. And, you know, and Forden did just, I mean, Dan Forden, he's one of my dearest friends. And that was just an epic, epic game. You know, you would ask who's like my favorite. That's my favorite game that I did not do. Oh, yeah. We haven't gotten to that question, but I did want to ask you that. Yeah, I just stumbled on it there, so I thought I guess that's kind of a spoiler. Sorry, Alan. No, go for it. We were going to ask you that. No, it's a wonderful, wonderful package, and Dan really had a great gift. He understood the DCS system. At that point, that was the second DCS game, right? We were kind of into that spot. I really am jumping ahead. We should probably come back to that and talk about DCS in another point. But yeah, you know, all these all those people, you know, so you think about the Beatles, obviously you think about the Grateful Dead. I mean, I'm a mad deadhead. I met my wife because I'm a deadhead. And so is she. And, you know, there's music that that's that's been floating around. And, you know, in those in the cracks between, you know, between the Beatles and Dylan and the dead and Little Feet and the Allman Brothers. And and, you know, certainly, you know, and Crosby, Sills and Nash, huge, huge fans. So these are all, you know, like, do you, are you guys old enough to know these? Yes, I was, I was raised on this stuff. My parents were listening to all this stuff. Okay, there you go. I was raised on classic rock, but what's interesting about all of your music is that it fits so well on all these games. And yet, as you said, it's kind of like, it's not the typical, it's not mainstream, like, we're doing bluegrass, And we're doing ragtime influences and we're doing all this stuff and people like and the pinball machine like wait what? And yet some of the best sound packages of all time are because you were able to create music with your influences and with your experience. And you had enough leeway even on the tighter leashes that that maybe Pat Lawler had to just get the best out of these things and to become iconic. These games are iconic because of their, you know, the sound and like a lot of why stuff feels so special. Yeah, that's that's something that we actually George Gomez, when we talked to him, he brought up is that like shots specifically will feel good. People people make a shot on a pinball machine and they go, oh, that feels good. And Gomez is like, well, why is it feel good? And a big part of that and something he mentioned was the sound. Absolutely. It's interesting with making something feel special with the choreography of light and everything combined with that. is just a huge, huge part of pinball and kind of what makes the game feel good. Can you discuss the psychology a little bit of what you're trying to do when you're coming up with sound effects specifically is the one I'd like to focus on more than necessarily songs? I know you mentioned a little bit just the experimentation process there and how you had an appreciation for that, but how do you nail the right emotion with a sound effect? You elicit emotional responses through sound. Some of my favorites, I just got to get through some of these because I want the listener because I'm sure they can hear these in their mind as they're listening to this episode. The gumball shot in Twilight Zone, right? The locking ball in the turbo shot on Indy 500. Yeah, that's a good one. The man overboard call out and hurry up theme. And obviously all the epic multiball starts like in Whitewater, Fishtails, Adam's Family, Whirlwind, Funhouse. The list goes on and on and on. But what I like about playing your games is when I need to hit something, the game is telling me I need to hit something. And I feel it like the music cues and the sound effects start to like raise in importance. And I think it's something you're good at. And that's, I guess, what we want to ask you about is like the psychology of using sound. You know, the first thing that you get into is what is the ball doing and how long does it take for the ball to do it? When you make an orbit shot or a ramp shot or something, you know, there's a specific amount of time that that ball takes from the time that it makes the lower ramp switch to the time that it makes the complete switch. And then you've got a couple of different possibilities because this is what interactive stuff is, you know, is all about. It's and it's real. It's real physics, you know, so you could hit a ramp shot, but not make it all the way up. So then you've got a ramp entrance that fails. So if you see if the switches that this game sees are ramp entrance and then ramp entrance again, That's a ramp fail. And at the point where you see that second thing, you know, that's potentially another sound. And we didn't always do it that way. You know, sometimes I just did it with one sound where I'd go, you know, the typical ramp entrance sounds something that goes. And then if you finish, then you go or something like that. And you have a nice conclusion to the thing. If it's a shot like the boat ramp on fishtails, then each one of those is a sequence. And you go through and it gets higher in pitch, higher in pitch, higher in pitch, you know, and gets further and further along through the sequence and you get towards, you know, either the hurry up state or the frenzy state. So you have a sound that can go and then if you fail, that sound might actually just be programmed by going, you know, or something like that, which is it's just the dumbest thing. You know, it's the simplest, just most basic sort of approach to have a rising thing and then a falling thing, you know, and to have a rising thing to a boom, there's some kind of an explosion thing, you know, and a lot of what Pat used to do when he would tell me what he wanted the game to sound like was we have these technical terms, right? One of the technical terms was P-A-D-O-W. Larry and I would sit there and go, how do you spell that, do you think? We'd mess around with Pat a little bit like that, but he would go P-A-D-O-W, P-A-D-O-W, and that's what he wanted the sound. So that's like a two-syllable celebration explosion. That would be what he'd want on those particular things. But getting to those things often featured that lead-up sound. So it would go, you know, kind of a thing like that. A lot of what I do in imagining what a pinball sound should be is I think in those technical terms. I think in those sound-effecty words. And I think about things that go, you know, things like that. Or things that go, you know, or just all kinds of goofy things like that. You know, when you think about the sound of a spinner, a spinner starts with a bright, sharp thing and then drops very quickly and then slows and then slows down. And I mean just the single sound that goes pew. And if you repeat that rapidly and then as it slows down, what you get is pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. And eventually you hear the whole thing, but it starts high and ends low, which maps to the fast then slow thing that's happening with the switch, right? So all of the real visceral physicalness of pinball, this is why pinball is so cool, is that it's so real. It's real stuff happening on a real play field. I was talking to somebody at Zynga just this week, and this woman that I work with, she's like, Pinball, what do you think it is about pinball? And I'm like, I think it's gravity versus your desire for success. And gravity is going to win, but you can make it an interesting contest. And that, to me, is what pinball is. That's why pinball is special, is that the basic mechanic, you versus gravity, you and a pair of flippers versus gravity, that's the whole thing. That's the whole game. It's Sisyphus, right? Like it's pushed the rock up the mountain and then eventually the rock falls down the mountain and you start over again. I would really avoid that metaphor. That is not where I was going with this. I was thinking much more in terms of a get to than I have to. So now you're right, of course, you know that you are pushing a ball uphill and then that ball is going to roll back down. Sure is anything, you know, so we're getting if we're getting philosophical, like I do jokingly say this to people about pinball and I don't not mean it. But, you know, I say like pinball is great because it teaches you about life. Like in the end, we all lose now. And you don't get to control everything that happens to you, but you control how you react to it. And so like pinball is a special game that we all share. That's why we have this show. That's why I run an arcade. That's why we're talking to, you know, one of my personal heroes here who made a lot of the sound packages for people that are into pinball. It's a special game. You know, it's absolutely meditative for some. It's competitive for others, but there's a reason why we all are drawn to this mystical, physical game under glass. And what makes it feel special and what we like about it is a little bit different to every person, but it's no doubt it leaves a strong impression on the people that it sits with. It doesn't hit everybody, but the people it hits really stick with it for sure. Well, you gotta, you know, you gotta enjoy watching that boulder roll back down the hill. And I know that Chris Granner will make it sound cool when it does.