undeniably the best. At that point, I guess when you're kind of working under Pat Lawler, was Pat just doing whatever the hell he wanted? Because those, that game of Stern's, they're loaded. They've got a lot of mechs. It doesn't seem like he was concerned with like the bill of material. So was there really any oversight or was it was just kind of Pat going crazy? Oh, no, there was oversight for sure, especially like when it was a little better after we had been there for a while. But like when we started, like Stern was still very much in dire circumstances. And there was a very, very long period of time there, probably up until like much later, like around when Iron Man came out, when I was like, this is Stern's last year. They're never going to make it another year. Every year I would be completely convinced that it was all over and there was going to be no more pinball. And I was very wrong, thankfully. But, you know, there was definitely oversight. One of the interesting things about NASCAR is that because it's got that kind of the cycling loop thing, that like eats up a lot of space in the cabinets, right? And so there's not as much space to put other stuff because it's not like there are any other real toys on that game. Yeah, you almost have like a safe cracker size playfield. There's that like a up-down car in the middle of the playfield. You got that trailer with the spinning clock. With the spinning thing, yeah. But other than that, there's not a lot on that. What I like about NASCAR is I like that it plays fast for a Pat Lawler game. That sort of gets pigeonholed as like the stop-and-go guy, as sort of the opposite of Steve Ritchie. like when people talk about the classic pinball designers and they're and they contrast their styles a lot I really like Steve Ritchie I like Pat Lawler games too there's some Pat Lawler games I love a lot but they're they're typically like hit a shot set up another shot very controlled he likes to hold the ball a lot and NASCAR's faster which I think obviously fits the theme it's kind of like getaway it fools you into thinking it's faster than it is because it's just well throwing balls around with a mag but I mean you can hit combos and you can hit combos in other pat lawler games it's not that you can't but it's just you know what i mean it's like you know you play fun house it's a slow game it's you're always in a you're always in a subway you're always in a scoop it's always catching the ball behind or you're throwing in rudy's mouth and it's a great pinball machine but it's just way different than playing you know acdc or spider-man or any of the steve richie games yeah and it's interesting because like i i i've always loved pat's games much more than Steve's games, but I think that's just because I'm by nature a much more nerdy and analytic, analytical kind of person. So I like the opportunity to do something to stop, to think about what I'm going to do next and set it up and do it and then recover and then think about what I'm going to do next. It's just like in, it's just like in my nature, but definitely on NASCAR. I think that Pat wanted to kind of channel a lot more of that Steve Ritchie energy into that game, and he was a huge NASCAR fan himself. So I think he wanted to find some of that energy. I guess that's what we want to talk about next is how are these themes chosen? Because, you know, full disclosure, some of these themes, I don't think people think are A-list themes. I don't know what you're talking about. Dude, they hit Ripley's Believe It or Not and the massive IP. So we want to I want to wonder if like is it was it just a product of the times like this is what Gary could get. You and I have spoken privately about some of these things and you were able to enlighten me on how some of these themes came to be. but I wonder if you could bring that to the podcast. Like, how did Monopoly come to be? How did Roller Coaster come to be? How did these games come to be? And like, who decided the themes? Like, was it the teams? Was it Pat? Was it all of you collectively? It worked different ways. Like, I was mentioning earlier before we got on that podcast that Pat had wanted to do a Monopoly game for a long time. And in fact, he had designed Safecracker to be Monopoly and they couldn't get the license worked out. And I think they were a lot more protective of the license back at the time that Safecracker came out. After they did the Monopoly slot machines at Williams, I think that Monopoly became a little more open to different use cases. And that's part of the reason why I think the Monopoly pinball later ended up happening. they had already acquired the license when I started so I wasn't really privy to that but I know that Pat had been interested in doing that for some time but I think that it was different in different instances I think most of the time people would you know say I have an idea for a game or a license and they would take it to Gary and Gary would say yes or no and if he said yes then it would be, you know, contact the licensee. Can we make this work at an affordable way? And if so, then you can go with it. But sometimes the licensees would come to Gary and say, hey, are you guys interested in doing a game? And then Gary would go around to the teams and ask them if they had any interest in it. Sometimes Gary would say yes, and you couldn't get the licensors on board and so you'd have to pivot. So some interesting ways that that worked out, I'll talk about here for roller coaster tycoon hey we when we were first talking about themes i had had i've i've long been a huge chuck jones and bugs bunny fan and i have always thought that looney tunes would be an incredible theme for pinball and so i brought that up to pat and pat liked the idea and then he brought it to gary and gary said no because he thought it was for kids and oh that which summer interesting when and now and now of course spooky doing the looney tunes game so i interested in seeing how that comes out yeah but then we were talking about other things that Pat wanted to do another theme park game We talked about ways to do it We tried to talk Gary into doing it unlicensed and he said no And there had been a period of time where a bunch of us at Williams were kind of obsessed with the Roller Coaster Tycoon video game. Makes sense. That game is fun. That game is so good. Yeah, it was fun as hell. It was fun as hell, yeah. And it was of its time. like at the time that game came out it was very yep of the time like it was it was very yeah all of my friends like we would go over to each other's houses and watch each other play roller coaster tycoon which is insane maybe some younger listeners or people new to the hobby maybe don't realize that but roller coaster tycoon was a kick-ass yeah ck and it spawned a ton of knockoff or spinoff games or whatever yeah like all kinds yeah there was like railroad tycoon and skyscraper tycoon all of this stuff anyway we proposed that to gary and he said yes and so that's how roller coaster tycoon came to be pat wanted to do a theme park game but we had to have a license and so we worked a license into this concept that's awesome right ripley's has a funny story we pat's original idea for ripley's was that he wanted to do crocodile hunter and he wanted to bring back there's this old em game called nip it and it has this um feature well i'm familiar i'm familiar it's alligator themed i'm familiar yeah yeah it's alligator there's an extra button on the cabinet where this alligator mech comes out and grabs the ball and pat wanted to like revive that idea in a modern pinball game but we couldn't get the we could never get the crocodile hunter people to return our calls and so we pivoted and pat wanted to do something kind of like spooky or creepy and again pat had an idea and we backed a theme into the idea that's really interesting And then we ended up getting very lucky because, you know, Steve Irwin tragically was killed like six months later. And that would have been like a real drag. Yeah, terrible time to market your game. Yeah, exactly. No, you just throw a little angel halo and wings on him on the back glass. Right, right. Well, I would have really sucked. So we dodged a bullet on that. historically speaking i think a lot of these games aren't pat's most famous games or the games that people remember most fondly but i do think that does seem like ripley's believe it or not is well regarded nowadays probably because keith ellen came out and said that he loves that game so the church of keith ellen everyone all of a sudden is like this game's incredible i want to ask you like do you what do you think of those four games that you worked on with pat lawler designs which one is your favorite and why i think that from a top to bottom standpoint nascar is the most well did hell yeah yeah if you look at the rules and the play field combined it's not my favorite of the four play fields by any means but the way that the rules and the theme are integrated with the play field i think makes it as a package the best game of the four i would say that my favorite play field of the four is probably Roller Coaster Tycoon. Yeah, I agree. I don't really think that the way that the rules came together on that game highlighted it in a way that I think was as successful. Interesting. We do a trip where we take our, we call it Boy Ride, which we'll do an episode on that later. But we take some of us and we travel to different cities. We do a daily road trip and we go to different places. And we ended up at a brewery and we're playing their Roller Coaster Tycoon. for a long time and having a great time really because it had been a while since any one of us got to play it and it was fun to shoot like it was definitely fun to shoot because speak really for the code or the rule set because we didn't play it long enough but it was a good time when that troll kind of bounces up and down and then it gets the ball does that like it's it makes me laugh and i'm like this is why i love pinball like i really love this yeah as someone like when i was a kid and i played pinball before i understood rules or anything all i cared were about habit trails like cool ramps cool rails and roller coaster tycoon is so cool yeah it delivers that yeah it's got like the three different bright colors which you don't see a lot of color habit trails around that time and so it's just cool well and and like we said we were all fans of the ip i think we all we grew up like alex and i grew up playing the the video game so it's like you're talking about the best-selling cd-rom game yeah exactly it always had a badge on it This is like best-selling into all the millions of 10 million units, whatever it's sold. I just love that they put that on the actual cabinet art. I think I want to end about your time working on pinball. I do want to clarify, like I see on IPDB, it says that you worked on dots and animations. Can you describe like your programming and what goes into that for the listeners? So basically a typical division of labor for software on a pinball machine is somebody would write the game code, the rules, basically, and then somebody would work on the dots or the display. That was like and it was usually kind of the person working on the display was sort of like what you gave the new kids to work on because it was easier and it's much less likely to make something catch on fire or whatever. and so i i mostly did dot programming and a little bit like i did i would do light shows i would do choreography basically as oh that's cool and so what would happen is that um we would sit down and we would talk about say a mode and we would say okay here's this mode we've got what kind of art do we want for it and what do we want the screen to look like or would we want to be happening then we would take that to the artist and he would you know put together some animations for it and then i would convert those to you know a digital representation and then i would make them happen you know i would like lay out the screen i would make them animate i would have we would have places for things like where are we going to put the score where are we what what is the text going to be you know like oh you like x to do that's cool why yeah well yeah because it would be like you know five more x to do y and then what happens when somebody makes a shot like what's the animation going to look like for that and stuff like that so and then some of it like you could like you could figure it out yourself like for instance in roller coaster tycoon for the multi balls there are these like little animal characters in roller coaster tycoon like there's a tiger and a panda bear and stuff like that and um and i told the animator like during in a multi-ball like when nothing's when you're not hitting any jackpots when you're just playing around it like shows the score and then i like wanted to have one of these characters be animated and dancing like the characters in the in the snoopy christmas yeah that's okay and so and so like there's one where like the tiger is dancing and his like head is just going back and forth and stuff like this like they're all mimicking the peanuts characters and stuff so we could do fun stuff like that but like day to day i was just like putting putting screens together animating them testing them lewis would send me like you know a bunch of codes and i would like try them out like and you'd have to test things like what happens if somebody scores 10 million points or if they add another digit does it make the score roll off the end of the screen or you know things like that and make sure it looks good with different, you know, if you've got 50 of something versus five of something, and then we would have to do stuff because it gets translated into other languages. So you would have to do things like German was always a pain in the ass because German is a very long language. So we would have to remake the screens for Germany because the text is so long. And, you know, that was always at the end of the project. And doing the translations was always really tedious. But the part where you're, like, putting screens together and trying them out and it's fun and you're like doing new like i did a thing where in monopoly where if you hit the bank it shakes this it takes a snapshot of the screen and shakes it like you like if oh yeah something and there was no code to do that so i just had to figure it out myself you know and it's like different things along those lines yeah those are kind of the fun little things that test you at work that actually keep it interesting and there was always discussions about like you know So like the fun part for me was the beginning part where we're talking about like what do we want on the screen? What kind of light shows do we want? How do we want to work it all together? What's going to happen when you hit a shot, you know, and all of this kind of stuff. And then putting it together was also fun, but not as fun as coming up with the ideas and then doing the stuff at the end where you're like doing like, you know, I've got to do the display for the for the administrative text for this fixture or, you know, you know, translations and stuff. that was always kind of like dragged on at the end, you know. It's like, in a lot of ways, it's like any other job in that, you know, there are parts of it that are really fun and parts of it that are really tedious. But, of course, the upside is that at the end of the day, you get to go out to a bar and see a pinball machine that you made getting played by people, which is really fucking rad. That was pretty much my biggest question for you is I would kind of expect, I work, I'm an electrical engineer, and so my day-to-day is just kind of a grind. And I'm always curious how much of a difference it makes just on a day-to-day satisfaction level if you're passionate about the end product. And is that something you really miss? And is it something you would move away from California for if you were given the opportunity again? It's kind of a hit and miss. And I think that it was really interesting. I think that one of the things that we really missed at PLD was because we were working out at Pat's house rather than at the Stern offices. is we didn't have that communal atmosphere that we had at Williams where everybody's on the floor everybody's talking about each other's games there's there's that real feedback loop that happens that would be huge difference we didn't really have that and I think that was a bummer and I think it hurts some of the games if I'm honest about it like other people might disagree but that's my feeling also I have to say that you know and I don't say this in any way to be seeing anything negative about Pac who is a genius but we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things in the rules and stuff like that and so there was a lot of conflict there and sometimes two people have conflict and neither of them are right or wrong right it's just like different visions right oh 100% yeah yeah so from that perspective it was always it was a bit of a struggle for me because I was working on pinball and I could and there is nothing like seeing something that you've made out in the world and people having fun with it and that's still like is a big thrill for me today but also it kind of a bummer because I feel like a lot of myself isn in those games or not as much as I would want It really is like any other job in that way Like it was very special but it was also like any other job in that there were some things that were great about it and some things that sucked about it. And sometimes people, you know, don't see eye to eye on things. And sometimes situationally, it's not, you know, the greatest. And so it's easy to glamorize, but there's a lot about it that was just like the same problems you have anytime you get a group of people. Yep. That makes sense. And that's kind of why I was excited to talk to you, because it's just a different perspective than like the big name celebrities you normally hear on. What do you mean? Greg Dunlap is a celebrity? No offense. Well, I get I've also been out of the industry for long enough that I can like, you know, say you've got it at enough. Yeah, but my my my job, you know, we are like excited. Alex was very excited when I said that you wanted to come on and talk on the podcast because, and no shade to anyone on any other podcast or whatever, but it's like a lot of times they have people that are currently working at pinball machine companies and they can't say a lot. I mean, they can't really talk about the game, the new game they're working on. If anything went wrong or got yanked out of their game, they can't say that they lost a battle and like they really, it would have been better with their vision. And they can't because they're still working at the company. So a lot of those interviews aren't as interesting as I think they could be. And I found some of the best interviews were like, there was one that I listened to with Chris Granner after he had been out of the industry for long enough, which is Sound Designers. Yeah, Chris did sound for all of the PLD games. Dude, Chris Granner's the fucking man. He is. Oh my God. He is incredible. The work that he did on games like Funhaus and Banzai Run, not Banzai Run, he didn't do, but Twilight Zone, Adam's Family, that guy, he was really good. Yeah. Fishtails, Whitewater. I mean, the dude is a legend. We'll do a whole episode on him just because I'm a super fan of Chris Graner, and I believe that his sound design added so much to games and that I think he's the GOAT. And I really don't understand why he doesn't do any more pinball work. nowadays with the industry doing better than it did before i'm sure he makes more money working in video games now or whatever but like oh man he's just so good at pinball i just feel like the pinball world's lacking without him in it but i won't disagree that's good greg it was nice to to chat with you i just want to talk about after you left at lawler designs and you stopped making pinball machines you were working for the pinball outreach project or pop for short and you had a location in Portland that I used to go to and I got to play a lot of really cool games there for the first time. I got to play Volley, which is a cool late. Oh, yeah. Full-size flipper EM from Gottlieb to Wedgehead and then Beat the Clock is the other one I remember. Oh, yeah. That game's cool. Yeah, which is a George Christian game. The guy that did 8-Ball Deluxe and Frontier and some other great games. But that game is timed. It's not, you don't have balls. You have, and a couple of pinball machines did that, but that's probably the best one. Yeah. Or maybe the only fun one. I don't know. Yeah. So Pinball Outreach Project was an organization that was started by my wife, Nicole, and she was, you know, getting active in the pinball community in the Bay Area. And she had a friend who worked at UCSF and, and she was just, she just had a situation in which I believe I've got this story, right? her sister had had a pregnancy that was difficult. And so they were spending some time in a children's hospital and she was just thinking about like kind of how bleak the place was, right? Thinking about how it would be much better if they could have like pinball in children's hospitals so that people, so that like families and kids, especially those who were in them for a longer period of time would have something fun to do, you know? And so she started working with some people in the Bay area to do events at different places. Like she would do an event at UCSF Children's Hospital, and they would do other kinds of events using borrowed games and whatever. After we met, she moved up to Portland, and we started working on putting games permanently on location in places. And so right now there are four pop games on location in Portland at Randall's Children's hospital and a couple of Randall McDonald houses and things. But her dream had always been to have a location where that was like all ages, kid friendly, where she could hold events and where we could offer free pinball for kids. And that was like really for the promotion of pinball to kids. It was a really, really cool thing that we did and it was really fun. But the problem was it was just not maintainable. Like it ended up being like a part-time job for me personally, like, like helping to run the place. We had some amazing volunteers, many of them from the Portland pinball community. And I am always thankful to them for the efforts that they put in over the years to pop, but it was never enough to keep the place going in a way that I didn't have to still be, or Nicole spending a significant amount of time there running. And so it was like over time, it was just like taking more and more of a toll for us and a lot of times it was barely breaking even too because like one of the unfortunate things for me about pinball in the modern age is that like if you have a place where people can't come and drink because the pinball audience is so tied to the bar audience now like it's very very hard to make money oh yeah that's something i'm going to talk about i have a whole series planned for this podcast that's pinball economics and about just that where it's like i don't think a lot of people realize this but like pinball itself even if they're like and it's a dollar a play or whatever it's like they're not making money at that it's like the parts and the labor it's just there's no way they're making money that way it's everything subsidized by alcohol sales that's why that's why it's hard to find a place where if you have kids and getting them to play pinball it's hard to find because so many of these machines are at bars. So, and they're at bars because the bar makes the money and the pinball machines just brings people to the bar. That's how operating pins makes money nowadays. Yep. That's true. And the funny thing is that most of the value in the pinball, you don't get to see until you sell them because right now pinballs hold their value so well, but it's like, if you buy a $6,000 game and put it on your floor, that 6,000, it's like buying a house that six thousand dollars doesn't mean anything to you until you sell the game maybe a hundred percent that's what i think a lot of the hobbyists don't realize for operators it's like an operator is not selling games so the sunk cost just hurts them yeah i mean you could always sell them but then if you're trying to get more then you don't have the games on exactly yes it's this cycle of like you don't make money operating games i'm going to go further into that in the future anyway but to get it back to pop that's a very cool project i didn't realize you guys still had pins at hospitals and stuff up here yeah yeah and we're actually looking into like doing i live in monterey california right now and we're talking to they just one of the hospital groups down here just opened a mental health center for kids and we're going to be putting a game in there and so you know i won't say that pop is like super active but it's not like it's not like a done deal by any needs you gotcha that's cool well i will say personally i loved going to pop it felt i mean we opened wedgehead a little bit after i think you ended or or the same year you ended in 2017 or so is when we opened and that's what we always tried to do with wedgehead you know my business partner roadsy very well i got to meet you through roadsy but i always appreciated going being able to go somewhere and play games of all eras it's something that we try to do now at wedgehead is something that we focus on. Roadsy and I will always fight because there will always be a new game coming out and he'll want to bring in some Stern machine from the last five years or something that we know works and people like. And I'm like, no, we got to bring another EM in or we got to like, we have to prioritize making sure that we always offer a selection of games so that it doesn't just end up being Sterns from the last five years. It's so easy to default to all Sterns because they're reliable. they just are going to work people want to play them when they're new anyway yeah and so yeah it's always kind of an effort so we put a lot of effort and there and you don't it's not like you don't get any credit for operating old games right like right like nobody gives you credit for it and there's plenty of players that just completely ignore the fact that they're on the floor at all but there's a whole group of people that they live to see you know an embryon or a paragon or something out on location or a volley or yeah you get to see those games and like that's what we travel for that's what i travel for i will travel to locations that put those games out and wedgehead i always want to be that space as well and pop was that and it was awesome it was great like when like we would have grandparents bring their kids in and the kids would be playing iron man or spider-man and then the grandparents would play volley and you could see their eyes light up because it's like so nostalgic for them like the chimes and the score reels and everything like it was really cool that is cool well i think we had a nice long chat there i just want to thank everyone for listening i want to thank our guest greg for joining us i hope that helped everyone understand a little bit of what it's like a peek behind the curtain into the pinball industry from someone that used to work in it then later transitioned out of it but is still a pinball player. You're still a pinball head. He loves pinball as much as anyone I've ever met. And I want to thank you for joining us. For everyone else there that there's listening, I want to end this like I end every episode, which is go out and play pinball. Yeah, and specifically play Pat Lawler's best game of all time, Stern NASCAR. Specifically, focus on playing Greg Dunlap masterpieces. Yeah, the quadrilogy. You're going to need to play all of them. So find a Monopoly, find a Rollercoaster Tycoon, find a Ripley's, find a NASCAR, and go out and play them. Yep. Until next time, everyone, good luck. Don't suck.