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BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 25m·analyzed·May 22, 2017
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Blockade Podcast 100th episode retrospective covers origins, early technical struggles, and community history.

Summary

The Blockade Podcast celebrates its 100th episode with hosts Chris Frebus and Jared Morgan reflecting on the show's origins, early technical challenges, and community evolution. They discuss the IRC chat room on Freenode that spawned the podcast, early episodes with multiple guests, the trademark issue with Barcade Corporation, and the evolution of recording platforms from Skype to Google Hangouts to Blab. Guest Jeffrey Strong, an original moderator, joins to recount early episodes including the infamous "chaos" episode with the Addams Family quiz bit.

Key Claims

  • The first 11 episodes of Blockade Podcast were lost when switching from Shout Engine provider due to copyright/trademark issues, and Jeff believes this was somewhat fortunate as they were rough.

    high confidence · Jeff and Chris discussing early podcast history and lost episodes during the 100th episode celebration

  • Barcade Corporation, which owns actual barcade venues on the east coast, sent a polite cease-and-desist letter about the podcast's name rather than pursuing aggressive legal action.

    high confidence · Chris and Jeff discussing the trademark issue around episode 7-8 and Gourd's role in handling the situation

  • The original IRC chat room on Freenode was started by Jared Morgan when he was working at Red Hat and regularly had people like Heretic, Shondon Carlos, Time Lord, Neglectoid, Delta Echo, and later Fig Jam participating.

    high confidence · Jared and Chris explaining the origins of the chat room and regular participants

  • The community conducted timed 'races' in Pinball Arcade where players would load a specific table, play for five minutes, return to chat and post scores within five minutes or be disqualified.

    high confidence · Chris describing the game mechanics they developed in the IRC chat room

  • Early podcasts averaged 90 minutes with scheduling that took about a week to align across US time zones and Australia, and posting took about two weeks due to Jeff's editing process.

    high confidence · Chris and Jeff discussing the logistical challenges of coordinating 8 people across multiple time zones

  • Heretic had been secretly listening to a Blockade podcast live session months ago with his mic on, and thought the hosts had heard all his negative comments, but Chris and Jared assure him they only heard a cough.

    medium confidence · Chris recounting a recent Hangouts incident where an unidentified participant joined and later revealed himself as Heretic via chat

  • Pinball Arcade head-to-head online multiplayer functionality that the community requested via emails to Farsight is coming out of beta and might be ready for play in a month or two.

Notable Quotes

  • “Without Gord, there would be no podcast because none of us would have met.”

    Jared Morgan @ Early in episode — Recognition of Gourd's role as forum administrator in enabling the community connections that led to the podcast

  • “It's the power of forums, isn't it? Forums can have their challenges sometimes, but overall Pinball Arcade Fans is a great community and full of passionate pinheads.”

    Jared Morgan @ After thanking Gourd — Reflection on how online communities facilitate connection and shared passion

  • “This feels a little bit like the product of the sun coming home from a drunken reverie.”

    Jeffrey Strong @ Upon rejoining after long absence — Jeffrey's characteristically poetic return to the show after not appearing for an extended period

  • “Oi, it's the Adams family.”

    Chris Frebus (doing Heretic's Irish accent impression) @ Recounting episode 3 quiz — The running joke from early episodes where Heretic always guessed Addams Family regardless of the clue

  • “I tried to be as detailed as possible... [result was a 30-step process]”

    Jeffrey Strong @ Discussing his handoff of recording process — Humorous understatement of the complexity involved in transitioning podcast recording responsibilities

  • “You realize all we talk about is pinball. Well, that's your problem.”

    Random caller during Blab era @ During discussion of Blab platform strangers — Humorous clash of expectations between the pinball-focused hosts and an unexpected caller

  • “Sean had an interesting technique... I'm just going to keep on talking and I'm never going to take a breath. And that way nobody can ever interrupt me.”

    Chris Frebus @ Describing Shondon Carlos's 'Lost in the Zone' segments — Characterization of how Sean Carlos dominated podcast segments through non-stop monologue

  • “It's like sitting with a professor in class, going into great depth of fun.”

Entities

Chris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonJeffrey StrongpersonGourd LacypersonHereticpersonShondon CarlospersonTime LordpersonNeglectoidpersonDelta EchopersonSkillshare / Fig JampersonBonzoperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Barcade Corporation demonstrated measured trademark enforcement by sending polite cease-and-desist rather than aggressive legal action against Blockade Podcast

    high · Chris and Jeff describe receiving 'a lovely letter' from Barcade Corp requesting name change without legal heaviness

  • ?

    community_signal: Blockade Podcast allows live chat participation from listeners during recordings, creating unexpected interactions and creating friction when random callers dominate discussion

    high · Multiple anecdotes about random callers including a woman going on anti-men tirade and the Heretic incident with accidental mic activation

  • ?

    event_signal: Blockade Pinball Podcast celebrates its 100th episode with retrospective discussion of origins, technical evolution, and community history

    high · Entire episode dedicated to 100th episode milestone with guest Jeffrey Strong recounting early podcast history

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Arcade Fans forum and its administrator Gourd Lacy provided critical infrastructure and support enabling the podcast's creation and continuation

    high · Jared and Chris explicitly credit Gourd for forum moderation access, private communication channels, and trademark issue handling

  • $

    market_signal: The origin story of Blockade Podcast shifts from bar chat culture to formalized podcast format as a community growth strategy

    high · Hosts explain that the original motivation was to attract more people to the IRC chat room through a podcast format

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.258

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. Spanning the globe, you are listening to the Blockade Podcast. Wait a second. No, let me try that again.
0:22
You are listening to the Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Chris Frebus, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. But joining me as always, Jared Morgan, halfway across the world. That's right, in Studio North Lakes this morning because I slept in.
0:36
Because this is Monday. It is actually Monday today. We're a little bit late doing the podcast because the whole family's been sick this weekend, including me, as you can probably hear. So, yeah, it's been a fun weekend. But we were not going to let Jared off the hook because, damn it, this is our 100th podcast. Yeah, we made it. We got to the tongue. That's right. The Blockade podcast, that little podcast about pinball, snacks, and movies, but mostly pinball, has reached 100. Yes, we have. Do we get a letter from the queen?
1:11
Yeah, we don't celebrate no royalty over here, not unless it's a reality TV royalty. We do in the colonies down here. I would expect a letter from the queen. Do you expect to be knighted? Sir Jared of pinball? Sir Jared of broadcast Well We're going to start with our normal bout of frivolity because we've got to warm up So let's start with snacks Guess what this weekend was, Jared? It's Slurpee Day, isn't it? Bring your cup Bring your own cup Slurpee Day So that meant bringing in the pitcher and filling that bad boy up which it basically equated to extra large Slurpees.
1:55

medium confidence · Chris mentioning the eventual realization of a long-standing community request to Farsight

Jeffrey Strong @ Complimenting Sean Carlos's 'Lost in the Zone' segments — Positive assessment of Sean's thorough but overwhelming approach to pinball knowledge sharing

Blockade Pinball Podcast
organization
Pinball Arcade Fansorganization
Pinball Arcadeproduct
Farsight Studioscompany
Barcade Corporationcompany
Freenodeorganization
Red Hatcompany
Skypeproduct
Google Hangoutsproduct
Blabproduct
Shout Enginecompany
Alien Covenantproduct
Prometheusproduct
Aliensproduct
  • ?

    personnel_signal: Jeffrey Strong transitioned from Blockade Podcast audio engineer/editor to guest status, with technical responsibilities eventually handed off to Jared Morgan via complex 30-step process

    high · Detailed discussion of Jeff's exit from technical role and his 'easy 30-step process' email that prompted the pivot to Google Hangouts

  • ?

    announcement: Pinball Arcade head-to-head online multiplayer functionality, long-requested by community through emails to Farsight, is coming out of beta and anticipated to be ready in 1-2 months

    medium · Chris mentions 'it might be ready for play in a month or two' after years of community requests

  • ?

    technology_signal: Evolution of podcast recording platforms from Skype (with complex virtual audio cable setup) to Google Hangouts to Blab, reflecting changing technical requirements and user experience priorities

    high · Detailed discussion of transitions between Skype, Google Hangouts, and Blab platforms, with specific technical pain points cited for each

    • But for only $1.50. Good time. That's pretty good. Yeah, I bet you those machines hate that day. Over there, it's just slop, basically, for most of the day in the machines. They've started to get at least smarter about the whole thing, because the very first year they did it, they didn't have any restrictions on what kind of cup you could bring in. Yeah, people wanted pools. Yeah, the little kiddie pool. Meeting pools. It was like, oh, hey, thanks for draining the entire Slurpee for everybody else. And then the following year, they dictated that it had to be a certain diameter.
    2:28
    Well, they've gotten so savvy that now they've got a stand-up, a cardboard stand-up with a hole cut out. And basically you have to be able to fit your container through the hole.
    2:38
    That's their measuring device. So I'm in there and this guy comes in and he's got a water jug. And unfortunately he didn't think it out too well in that the water jug was too long, so he couldn't fit underneath the spout except for putting it on an angle. And the spout is your typical narrow water jug spout hole.
    3:00
    And so he's sitting there trying every configuration possible, trying to get it so the Slurpee mix actually goes into the container. It was like... Amateur, amateur, amateur. I was sitting there because I was waiting for my flavor to finish freezing because somebody had just come in with a giant pail and filled it up to the brim. So there was nothing left in mind, the flavor that I wanted. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, have you tried using a lid upside down as a funnel? Okay, have you tried cupping your hand like this? Okay, have you tried? I'm like giving all these suggestions. I'm like being the slurpy sage. Slurpy sage. Yes, have you sacrificed enough slurpy cups in order to fill up your vessel there? Exactly. But then you had to go and ruin my day because you were like, oh, I can't wait to see the pictures. And I was like, I don't want to see any pictures.
    3:51
    Doing it wrong, man. Although it's the same thing as last year. Exactly. It's going to be the exact same container.
    3:58
    Yeah. Is anyone smart? And they go, oh, so it's a certain diameter. Well, I'll just put an end cap on a bit of PVC pipe and bring that in. You know, a 12-meter long PVC pipe with an end cap on it. It's like, hey, look, it fits through the hole. Whatever. It's perfect. yeah they also yeah i think they actually have a a length uh limit on it too but yeah i can imagine you're making a slurpy bong or something totally yeah slam that one oh man would that be a brain freeze oh you'd have to have like this huge diameter pipe basically right right because it'd be so much of it you wouldn't go drink it fast enough challenge accepted if they've been doing it which they never will because slippies are so expensive here like a large like an 8 ounce 16 ounce cup here would be about $3 Australian holy crap that's a large yeah it's a large our small cup is 12 ounces and then the next size up from that is 22 ounces I'm trying to get my ounces right It's the same, approximately the same size cup as I get at Costco.
    5:13
    Well, yeah, it's 590 milliliters, which is, I don't know what that equates to in Imperial, not Imperial, in American.
    5:24
    Oh, Google. Yeah, exactly. But I think we actually have the 12-ounce cups here at Costco. So, yeah, it's about that size. So they're not big, and they're $3. Wow. What a rip. We get gouged with Australia tax here. I guess, man. It's brutal, which is why I never had them, which is why places like McDonald's and Hungry Jack's have a large one for a dollar. That same size. Oh, right, right.
    5:55
    So you basically get, because it's frozen Coke, not Pepsi, which I think is the people who make Slurpee. Nope, nope. There are certain flavors at 7-Eleven you will always find. You will always find Coca-Cola. You will always find Wild Cherry.
    6:14
    And then you'll usually find like a Blue Raspberry. You'll usually find a Pina Colada. And then it starts getting into the funky flavors.
    6:23
    Occasionally, we get a Pepsi product in there. So sometimes you get a Mountain Dew, Frozen Mountain Dew. Oh, those are so yummy. Yeah. I've had that before. Right now they have this funky one called Pepsi Hot. What?
    6:38
    It's Pepsi with a cinnamon infusion. So when you drink it, it starts off sweet, and then it kind of goes like a Red Hot was mixed in. It's really kind of a trip. That is bizarre. Yeah, of course I get it all the time. I can tell you for a fact in Australia that all the Slippy products are made by PepsiCo. there's no you can't buy coke here yeah we got pepsi in a number of different like on you know the soda fountains yeah heaps I think KFC here used pepsi and it's on post mix when I was in Australia what was that almost 15 years ago I couldn't find a pepsi product to save my life it was coke sprite and diet coke and that was it and then beer Yeah. Now you can get Pepsi everywhere. It's really common. Yeah, so there you go. Interesting. The regional variations and Slurpees. Yes. And then on the movie front, the new Alien movie just opened up, Alien Covenant. Covenant, yeah. So, of course, I had to go see the first showing. I really enjoyed it, but I will say this. If you did not like Prometheus, you're not going to like Covenant.
    8:06
    If you did like Prometheus, you're going to like Covenant even more because it basically answers gaps. It fills in some gaps. It does a little bit of retconning, you might say.
    8:17
    Issues that people had with Prometheus, they kind of went, maybe we'll make an explanation for that. And so they kind of did that. And in some respects, it even makes Alien 3 better because of some of the implications that happen in this. You can infer all the way to Alien 3. hmm so it sounds like before i even go and consider seeing this movie i first need to go and re-watch all the alien series because i don't think i've actually you're gonna hate me for this i don't think i've actually ever fully seen an alien movie from start to finish i got my claws out right now i'm gonna just pieces um i can basically see the uh the extra mouth coming out of your mouth right now. I'm about to take me.
    9:00
    No, in order to see this, honestly, all you need to see is Prometheus. All right, okay. Prometheus, and then I'll be up to date. Because that's the story. Because I haven't seen that either.
    9:14
    It's continuing the story from Prometheus. The other films it's more, I mean, you might say that you'll just catch Easter eggs because you're familiar with the other films, but they're by no means required viewing. That's, I mean, that's what happens with a prequel, right? Technically you shouldn't have to watch the, the others. Should not have to. No. That being said, you need to go watch my favorite movie of all time, which is aliens. Yeah. Do it for great justice. Come on. Yeah. Watch it with a kiss. I love you.
    9:46
    Yeah. My wife won't. Cause I'll be going, mommy, why is there a really big alien in the corner of my room wanting to eat me alive? Why is it that I have not been able to fall asleep for the past five days? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it'll probably be me because it's a disturbing movie. Like, it really plays on the creep factor of a good horror. It's so good. I remember that. Yeah. It's so suspenseful. And pretty much everything happens in the last 30 minutes of it. Well, I was kind of messing around with that movie the other day, just seeing if it would play out with my TV converting it to 3D. No, it doesn't. my TV was having really spatial problems trying to figure out the algorithm of turning it into 3D.
    10:33
    Because it's only dark. There'd be no ways of working out the layers. Well, it's dark and pointy things, and anything that catches the light, then the algorithm wants to apply a depth to that. And so there were things that were spiky for no reason being spiky. Lights on consoles were hovering above the consoles. yeah it was yeah it wasn't it didn't work very well but what I noticed was it was a full hour and ten minutes before you saw an alien wow see that's a big build up right think about them trying to do that in a movie today if you don't see it in the first five minutes people are walking out this movie is crap crap. So, but yeah, I'll just say if, if you enjoy Prometheus, you'll enjoy this. If you hated Prometheus, you're just going to be hating this all over again. So that's, well, that's good. That's a, Chris's pro tip, pro tip review. So, Hey, why don't we, why don't we talk about, what are we going to talk about? I don't know. What should we talk about? Oh, I know. Why don't we talk about us doing a hundred episodes of podcasting? Hey, that'll work. That will work. bet all right um we uh first off before we even go any further i just want to give a big shout out big thank you to gourd lacy gourd is the one that created the pinball arcade fans uh website gourd has uh turned us into mods gourd has let us have uh access to certain areas of the forum so that we can communicate privately with each other, specifically about the podcast. He's really always been there for us and whatever we've needed, he's provided. And I mean, without him for absolutely for a fact, there would be no podcast because none of us would have met. You might say. Yeah, absolutely. We like to give credit to Farsight because without Farsight, we'd have no subject to talk about in our podcast. I mean, they certainly influenced us talking, but without Gord, there'd be nothing.
    12:50
    So we would never have met. Exactly. That's exactly it. And this is the power of forums, isn't it? Like sometimes, you know, forums can be, you know, they have their challenges sometimes, depending on the forum. But overall, Pimple Arcade Fans is a great community and full of passionate pinheads. and I think you could, if you delve into some of the less frequent areas of the podcast, less frequent areas of the forum rather, there's a lot of good stuff to be had in there and it is easy to make friends if you really want to. So, yeah. If you want to. If you don't want to make friends, it's really easy to make enemies. Yeah, it is. And that's when we step in.
    13:35
    Or at least we used to step in. So to continue with this very early discussion of the early, early days of our podcast, why don't we bring in a voice we have not heard in a very long time? Look who it is, Jared. It's Jeffrey Strong. It's Mr. Jeffrey. I got to admit, boys, this feels a little bit like the product of the sun coming home from a drunken reverie. Right?
    14:02
    Various forays into the never-reaching. plans where I've been wondering for the last, I don't know how long it's been since I've been on the show, but it seems like it's been a while. Oh, it's been a very long while. I'm not even sure exactly how long of a while it is, but here's the deal. Jeff was a moderator before Jared and I were ever a moderator.
    14:26
    Jeff also went with me up to, or I met him up there at Farsight on, I think that was the second time I visited? Yeah, I believe it was. Yeah. Was it 2013?
    14:42
    I believe so, and we went up there to go interview Bobby at Farsight, and it was one of those things where I was like, well, what can we do with this audio? Oh, hey, we can put it on a podcast, but by that point, I think we'd already actually started the podcast. Yeah, it started out as just a Q&A with Bobby, right? Yeah, yeah. Something I was like, hey, let's... Because at first it was just text where we just sent him like five questions. Right. Oh, that's right. You were doing on the Pinball Arcade fan forum, you were doing Ask Bobby questions. Mm-hmm. And then we were like, hey, let's just turn this into audio. And I was kind of just doing a solo at first. Right. And then I think because we went up there together, we were like, hey, let's just record this, do an interview up there while we're there. Mm-hmm. And then I think you had the idea. It's like, hey, let's do some banter and stuff like before the interview. it was kind of like at first it was a little like we were you know i just kind of getting warmed up we didn't know what the hell we were doing basically oh god did we not know what the hell we were doing funny because those first 11 episodes have been lost um when we switched over to the new um shout engine um provider from the old blockade thing because of the um copyright um trademark infringement issue um that's another story oh yeah that's another story um we There was like the first 10 episodes where we had all of us in, and those have been lost to history. For some reason, they didn't export, which I think in some ways is a good thing because they were a little rough.
    16:18
    Well, let's talk about how we even got to that point, and that is we used to hang out in the chat room. There was a IRC chat room. Jared, did you start that? I did. That was when I was working at Red Hat, and I was on IRC all the time. And I thought, hey, why don't I just go and set up a chat room on Freenode, and anyone who wants to can join. I put instructions up in the forum of how you could do it, and they would just go in there and chat real time rather than asynchronously on the forum. And it actually took off. There were a few people that joined on a regular occasion there, Yes. And most of the time it was usually Heretic was in there all the time.
    17:05
    And then, yeah, other people randomly came in. Some of them were a little bit troublesome and I had to kick ban them. But that was fine. So it was a very lively discussion. And what it was was basically, yeah, we would get – there was a group of regulars, and among the regulars, Jeff was definitely one of them. Shondon Carlos was always in there. Heretic was always in there. Time Lord. We also have Neglectoid and Delta Echo.
    17:39
    This guy, Skillshare, who later became Fig Jam. Yeah. That was one of the people that Jared had to give the boot to. But we would all gather and, I mean, we would do things like what we called the race, which was we'd all load up Pinball Arcade and we'd set a timer and we'd say go. And then we'd leave the chat room to go play Pinball Arcade for five minutes, one specific table. And then we'd come back and then we'd post our scores. And if you didn't post your scores in under five minutes, then you didn't count. You lost. But you had to post your score. And then whoever had the best score, we were like, hooray, that's who won. And that's when we started then firing off emails to Farsight saying, hey, we need an online mode. We need head-to-head.
    18:22
    Yeah. Which all these years later we might actually have happening. It's like coming out of beta. It might be ready for play in a month or two.
    18:34
    Yeah, that was a lot of fun, eh? Yes, it was. But then we would also just have these discussions, and a couple of the guys would have tipped back. Mainly that was Heretic and Skillshare, having tipped back a few beers or other substances.
    18:49
    And we used to joke that it was like us sitting on bar stools having a chat. And if memory serves me, Heretic was the one that suggested that we should do a podcast of it. Correct. Then for some unknown reason, I got nominated that I would be the moderator of it because I was somehow able to rein in the chaos.
    19:13
    Yeah. Plus, we really thought you had a great radio voice, too. You know, I think that kind of tied everything together.
    19:20
    The funny thing is, is now you can't get me to shut up. That was always a problem. but so we started really kind of banding about going hey you know what this is not a bad idea and we were initially looking at it as a way to get people to more people to join the chat room because at that point that's all we cared about was you know we want people in the chat room we didn't want it to we wanted to be always lively and always busy and so it was like hey why don't we carry some of this attitude forward into the uh into a podcast and so that is why the name of our podcast became known as the barcade because we're like hey arcade and it's like a bar in here you know it's everybody sitting back and and we'd heard the term that uh there was bars that were having thermal machines popping up and that they were known as barcades little did we know and we would find that out uh around episode seven or eight actually that uh barcade was a trademark name owned by a corporation on the east coast that had actual places called barcade and all of a sudden we had this podcast popping up and we had twitter handle and they sent gourd a lovely letter saying could you please maybe not use that name and gourd chimed in and was like uh guys i don't need a lot and we went okay yeah let's change that they were really good about it though like they didn't get the heavies on us they just asked us politely if we wouldn't mind changing and we went oh we had no idea just leave it with us we got this hold our beer you know Jeff what do you remember about those early podcasts oh they were you were doing all the editing oh yeah you were posting the podcast you did all the audio and the recording it was pretty wild man especially when you had so many voices from an editing perspective because you had to kind of like you know weed through it and get everybody you know to make it sound halfway reasonable and you had to do a lot of snipping and trimming as Jared knows how it goes But you throw a bunch of voices in there and it definitely makes it a little more of a handful But, yeah, it was fun, though. I mean, I know we had a lot of good laughs, a lot of good times, a lot of joking around. And some of those, I know we had one, what was the name of one of our early ones where it was just, like, so wild and crazy? Well, that would be the infamous episode three that featured the quiz.
    21:54
    The quiz was us speculating what the next season's tables were going to be, I believe, or what some tables were going to be. And the joke was that me doing my hideous Irish accent to pretend to be heretic.
    22:08
    My response always, my guess. Oh, I know. Excuse me. Now I'm remembering what this thing was. I would read out clues as to what a table would be, and then everybody would take their guess as to what those tables were. And the heretic's answer always was the Addams Family. Because at that point, we didn't think Adam's family was ever going to be a possibility to come into the game. And it got requested like five million times every day. You know, it was like everybody's like, give us Adam's family.
    22:36
    There's literally a new thread every week about requesting Adam's family, eh, Jeff? Exactly, yeah. It was nuts. It was crazy. So let's see if I can drum up a little bit of what the heretic voice for that was. Jared, give me throw out a really bad clue for what a pinball table might be like if you were to describe Creature from the Black Lagoon in hint terms it's got hot dogs it's got four rollover lanes it's got two ramps, one of which is a double-stacked ramp.
    23:25
    Oi, it's the Adams family. Who is not responsible? Be like, well, why is it the Adams family? Oh, don't you know? It's got those hot dogs. And you know who's always eating the hot dogs? And I don't even know where I'd go from there. I had the whole thing scripted out. Terrible. I remember he had to put leaps and bits in there too. You know, cut out the, because he would, you know, go into a curse. Oh, yes, I swear. Yeah. And the best part about that whole thing was Shondon Carlos was not on board. He wasn't. He was getting so frustrated with us, and that just made us giggle and laugh, thinking it was the funniest thing in the world.
    24:09
    But that episode was absolute chaos. I remember that one. It was even entitled something like that, like chaos. Oh, yeah. yeah it was good times then we had one it was called much ado about nothing yeah the joke was there but it was that was another good one i think some of those were really fun even though they were you know a little rough around the edges and kind of just a little i i tried re-listening to a couple of them before they'd gotten deleted and i i literally was just like cringing it was uber painful um yeah and part of that too was we look you had eight people in we were trying to find a time slot that would be good for those of us in the u.s because at that point jeff you were uh east coast no no no that's no i take it back no you were you were here on the west coast by that point yeah i just moved yeah um But Sean and Time Lord, they were both in Central Time, and then Bonzo was in Europe and Germany, and Jared in Australia.
    25:22
    I thought Echo was East, wasn't he? Was he East? I thought he was like that. Portland, I believe. Yeah, Portland. I think he was West Coast. But anyway, what we wound up having was this exceedingly narrow window of when everybody could actually be live. and we would spend like the object a week trying to organize a schedule because we would be like oh okay we want to record once a month oh yeah yeah that's great well it would take about two weeks would you say Jeff before you'd actually get posted yeah I would kind of take my sweet time with the editing process it was hot that's why so the podcast would just come on air and then I'd be sitting there talking me, okay, guys, it's time for another podcast. I'd be like, what? It just got posted. I'm like, no, we're doing it once a month.
    26:13
    Then it'd be like, we'd be like, so when is everybody available? Yeah, Jared's right. It would take about a week just to try and align everybody's schedule and try and get it going up. That was brutal. We were doing 90-minute shows, I would say. Sometimes on average. Yeah, sometimes on average. We'd sit there and try and be like, okay, here's what we're going to do in the show and we'd we'd assign times which is a joke but we'd be like okay it's going to be five minutes for the or three minutes for the intro and then we'll do another five minutes of this and then we'll we'll have our small segment which will last 15 minutes and then we'll have our large segment which will last maybe 25 minutes well yeah the small segment would wind up going a half an hour the large segment would going 45 minutes um yeah and then Sean bless his heart with his lost in the zone. The never ending lost in the zone. Yes. It was like sitting with a professor in class, like going into great depth of fun. You know, well, Sean had an interesting technique. I was hoping Sean would be able to call in today and who knows, he might still in the time that we're, we're recording this, but Sean had an interesting technique, which was, I'm just going to keep on talking and I'm never going to take a breath. And that way nobody can ever interrupt me to do anything about what they want to talk about. because I'm just going to continue talking about pinball and how to play pinball and how to best get the biggest score because if you follow what I'm saying, you're going to be able to get these really high scores. But first, what you need to know is how to launch the ball. Now, in order to launch the ball, and he would just go, and you're like, and he would just ignore you if you tried to interrupt.
    27:49
    He'd still roll right over you. Yeah. I got to say, it was very well done, though. I mean, he covered everything there was to cover. As thorough as anything, man. And people liked it, too. yeah they did they actually did like the lost in the zones and it was because of like sean's knowledge of game rules that made it so good but from a listening perspective it was like a wall of sound and if it was a table you didn't care about there goes quite literally 45 minutes of the podcast exactly you just fast forwarding it yeah so it was it was pretty hard plus we had some mic issues with them where he'd often sound kind of like robotish or something where you know Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was probably, he had one of the worst mic setups of all the podcasters there. When we alerted everybody that we were doing this 100th podcast and kind of sending out the invite for who could come, that was Sean's first thing. I hope my mic will be on.
    28:46
    He was like, dude. It was almost like a literal android, like, give you the pinball tips, you know? Yeah.
    28:56
    It was good, though. It was good. So some other things that we had to deal with. Main one was, how are we going to record this thing? How are we going to get everybody into the same environment to have a session? And so I think we initially looked at Skype. I don't know. Did we ever do a session on Skype? Do you guys remember? Yeah, we did a few on Skype.
    29:22
    Yeah. And it was kind of a nightmare to record. Oh, that's really because of the conversion for you. It didn't convert easily. Yeah, I had to do some jumps through some hoops to get it to record. I had to use like some audio pass-through and all that sort of crazy stuff. Yeah, virtual audio cables and stuff just to get it. Because to get the mics, you know, to get my mic to record and everything, it was a little bit of a pain, but it did work. That's right. But, yeah, it was a bit of a logistical nightmare, but it worked out. It just took me about like a half an hour to set it up in advance.
    29:55
    Yeah, you had to use something like, it was Soundflower or something like that, wasn't it, that you used? I think it was called VAC, virtual audio cable. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had to use like two or three of those just to get it to work. This is actually good. It was terrifying when Jeff informed us that he was no longer going to be doing this, recording and everything. It was terrifying because we're like, well, how do you do it? And he sent out this email. This easy 30-step process to actually get the podcast to record. I tried to be as detailed as possible we went nope and that's when Jared was like you know there's this thing called Google Hangouts well we had used Google Hangouts before we were having issues yeah we had some major issues yeah I think it's come a long way since then oh yeah it's so yeah so we used we went back to Hangouts for a little while and then Jared discovered Blab which I really liked Blab oh it was so good It was really awesome, really easy for people to log into, to be notified that you're on air, to find your actual podcast. You know, if they just went to the lab. Yeah, if it was live, it was like, oh, I mean, we had strangers logging in all the time.
    31:16
    The problem is that some of those strangers would want to talk. There's that one chick, right? She was like, oh, she went on this tirade about men or something like that. Yes. Oh, she was terrible. We're like, you realize all we talk about is pinball.
    31:34
    Well, that's your problem. And we're like, okay, we're going to mute you. Oh, see you later. You're gone. Yeah, that was really funny getting those random callers in sometimes. Crazy told me one time about where he accidentally had his mic on, and he was rambling along with the show, and he had no idea. Did this all get edited out? Because I went to check the podcast. I was like, I didn't hear any of that. You guys must have. No. No, we didn't hear it either. That's the funniest thing. Heretic thinks that because he this was only guy maybe a couple months ago.
    32:04
    He joined our podcast live and whatever his name is in Hangouts, it isn't Heretic. So we had no clue who this person was that popped on until they started writing comments because we have a group chat. And this is why we always encourage people. hey, if you want to pop in during our podcast, we allow the chat to happen. So if you want to post questions or whatever, it's really good that it'll help shape our show. Basically, we may not put you on air, but we'll be able to hear that. So he was in the chat section and all of a sudden we heard like a cough or something. And we're like, oh, hey, your mic is live. And so we we cut it. Well, I guess that entire time he had been bashing us or saying snide comments, but we never heard a single one of those. Well, he was mortified thinking that we'd heard them all. He was strewn throughout the podcast, and we're like, dude, no, seriously, the only thing we ever heard was like a – you know? And he doesn't believe us. He does not believe us and swears up and down. He's like – because we're like, we want to get you on the podcast. we want to hear you talk. And he's like, Oh, nobody's going to be able to understand a word I'm saying. I've got too thick of an accent. And we're like, just let us, that could be the comedy of it. Yeah. And yeah, that completely scared him away for months.
    33:27
    So close. Yeah. So close. So yeah, we, we finally, some of the other things were in the early days. We used to have a private chat room, Jared, do you remember that? the barcade that's right private barcade that's right that was because of one of the initial people that was going to join our podcast um just give a little history here uh so of the voices that were always going to be in the podcast it was myself jared bonzo sean jeff uh neglectoid time lord delta echo then heretic always threatened that's why i always did his fake accent because we always talked about how heretic was going to be in the podcast and then he wasn't so it was like Well, we've got to have something representing him. And then this individual by the name of Skill Shot, who was in the initial planning stages of the podcast. You know, he was on all those discussions about what we should do. But it was literally about a week or two before we did our first session that he went on a massive tirade. And he had a habit of going into the chat room and bragging about how awesome he was. Oh, yeah. Jared came up with, well, I don't know if you came up with, but you know of the acronym. Why don't you speak it out for us? Because it's better in an Australian accent. Skillshot got renamed FigJam. Now, FigJam is an acronym. It's an acronym. It stands for Frack on Great, Just Ask Me.
    34:57
    And he would talk about how great he was and how awesome a player he was. He was amazing. He is top of the leaderboard. He, like, prepares for days to do the tournaments. Like, fig chair, man. And if you had any issues with him, his immediate response was, well, play against me, brah. Play against me. Come on. Set me up that way. And we'd all just be like, we don't care.
    35:20
    Just be quiet. This isn't like we're not playing for pink slips here, mate. It's just, you know, it's just pinball. We're just talking about pinball here, mate. Yeah, he was very. I don't want to bash on the guy necessarily, but I do want to give credit that, yeah, he was there also in the initial stages, which was the starting stages of the podcast. There was a point at which he was fine, and then he just flipped. I don't know what happened, but he just changed. His personality changed, and it was not for the better. So we had to take action. Yep. So in November of 2013, we did our first podcast.
    36:00
    Yeah. That's when it was. almost three and a half years ago, basically. Time flies. Things were chugging along, and by about episode seven, we started realizing that, hey, maybe we should have an external podcast page, because we were clogging up the forum.
    36:20
    We were using the forum as the hosting site, weren't we? Yeah, we were. Yeah, basically, yeah. And you were using Mega Upload or something. I think you were using MegaRapWave to put the episodes up. People could just download them.
    36:35
    Yeah, so we realized that wasn't really being fair to Gord, putting that kind of taxation on him on the site. And plus, what happens if Gord decided to yank it? Because we were like, well, that ain't good. We want to still have our large stuff. And be independent.
    36:50
    Right. And then we got the notification. And so we had about changing the name. So I found this, and I thought it was really funny. We needed a new name for the podcast. And so we started spitballing what those names should be. So I'm going to rattle off some of the suggestions that were put out there. Let's see if you guys see these. So we had Flipped Off, Ballers, Slam Tilt, Center Drain, Pin Fail, Pin Bomb, The Backstop Podcast, Pop Bumpers Podcast, Pin Geeks, Pin Fools, Z Division,
    37:25
    Straight Down the Middle. this one came from Bonzo and you have to realize in his German accent he wanted it to be PAF cast so Pinball Arcade fans cast but he pronounced it sounded like Puffcast we're like Puffcast?
    37:46
    isn't that going to be the Puffcast? yeah and then Jared in chat found the Blah Blahcade and then we kind of were like well that's not too bad and Jeff you came up with pin bar because you're like well that's not too far off the mark from barcade and then the more we kind of let it roll off our tongue the more we liked blah blah and then again Jared suggested why don't we shrink that down even more to just blockade and the origin of that basically was because all we do is chat we go blah blah blah we'd also kind of discuss the fact that hey because we talk about various other things Maybe we shouldn't make it so much.
    38:29
    Yeah, that's all about TPA or because our initial logo, we actually had the pinball arcade in the logo. We had it was all about pinball. You're like, well, that's kind of deceptive to do that. Yeah. But among those among the discussions with the with the names, because there are some people like it doesn't really matter what we call ourselves. And I said, oh, but it does. Can you imagine being called Fluffy Flipper's Pinball Jamboree?
    39:00
    To which everybody was kind of like, I don't know. That's kind of fun. I like that. But the blockade just had a perfect ring to it. It did. It did. And it kind of sounded like barcade, muffled, but I mean, it really captured the essence. So in episode nine, that was when we officially became the blockade. Now, in retrospect, it probably wasn't the best name to actually go with because from an SEO perspective, it says nothing about pinball. Yes. So search engines don't exactly work well for us. Which is why when I set up the website, which I'm sure you'll be coming up with, I decided to add extra text around it. So it's the Blockade Digital Pinball Podcast, but it's still called Blockade. Yeah. and I think that has helped a little bit with discoverability and when you type in pinball in iTunes it does pop up granted we're like the 44th podcast that pops up but at least it pops up because no one gives us reviews that's why no one reviews the podcast even if it was just five stars nice job guys that would be great or four stars nice job guys if it's one star we'll just let you keep on walking so yeah so then you guys send me a fiver i'll go give you a review come on all right oh yeah yes yes wait wait isn't there a uh some uh user farm in india that we can hire they uh give us probably right um you're rolling rolling the reviews then boys by october of 2014 we came up with the or i we came up with the logo and we all agreed on uh the current logo that we use. Um, and then, yeah, I did. I did take that. I'll take credit for that. I still, I still wish that somebody that had good knowledge in, uh, good knowledge of, of Adobe illustrator, that they would come in and actually redesign our logo and, or just plain good knowledge of logos. you know, I need to professional touch. It's funny you mentioned that. because I actually work with someone who is an absolute gun designer, and she is just so good at making stuff. And I was going to actually ask her.
    41:18
    Well, I actually wanted to. I don't feel right doing it for no money because she's that good. I actually wanted to pay her some money for it, but I would like to actually see if she'd be willing to rework it. So you and I will probably have to talk offline about this, about what we want that logo to do and how we want it to change. But I think there's a possibility she'll do it. She actually does do side hustles.
    41:40
    I like it. I reckon it'd be an easy job for her to do based on the other work I've seen. She's a 3D artist. She's amazing.
    41:50
    Her name's Abby Shannon. She works with me at Labbrokes. She's an absolute gun. While I like our logo, it's clear that it was not a professionally designed logo. No, she could really whip it into shape. Yeah, you see it all the time with different corporations throughout the history. you look at their logos, they're constantly changing them. And they retain the feel, but there's something new and fresh about them. And that's what I would love is retain the feel, but give a new fresh take on it. And it would be good, too, because it would mean we could do, like, we could actually go and do a relaunch of the shirt and everything like that. What? Or T-shirts. Yeah. Did you buy a T-shirt? Of course you didn't.
    42:31
    Sorry. It's on my list, I'm sure. Yeah. It's on everybody's list. A little segment here at Blockade. It's time to go. You can see the little hook come up from the side of the stage and pulls me out. Right, right. And then I was just kind of looking at further notes Sean last broadcast was the 20th episode that we did that was in june of 2015 uh what was that chris well you think it my fault no no that was no because that was when he did uh his acdc lost in the zone that i think lasted 45 minutes it literally was a 45 minute lost in the zone and then the very the very next podcast um sean wasn't going to be available and I think I was frustrated with the length of that podcast and so I decided to do a lost in the zone on Big Shot because I could not think of anything more ridiculous of a table that needed a table discussion than Big Shot and I did my best impersonation of Sean and Sean was not happy with us.
    43:45
    It was probably tough for the podcast after that. That was specifically where I literally spent five minutes on how to launch the ball. yeah and the fact that everything in the big shot was like you're gonna die everything's gonna die I remember it vividly it was fantastic I was stifling my laughter all the way through you went with a shot that wasn't gonna work well you were like and then you're gonna die your ball will die so yeah if you want to hear the amazing thing that probably sent Sean running from our podcast forever it's I believe episode 21 and then we kind of so jeff like i said i don't know when you bailed from doing this it just kind of got tiresome for you i know that uh it was kind of all the editing and stuff was just like all right yeah i was still i'll still working quite a bit at that time i've since kind of slipped into retirement a bit but uh yeah it was just uh it just got to be a little too much with everything going on and my health issues uh and and whatnot so yeah i just kind of figured i'd turn the reins over to you guys. And I'm really proud of what you guys have done. By that point, we had kind of lost Time Lord, we'd lost Neglectoid, we'd lost Delta Echo. So, I mean, it was really down to basically Sean, Jeff, Bonzo, and Jared and myself. I was just going to say, I don't think I was really playing the game too much at that time either. I think I kind of got a little disillusioned with the current state of it at that time. I don't want to be too negative on the show. So I just kind of just needed a break. Oh, that's right, because that's when we instituted 60 Seconds of Rage. with Jeff. I totally forgot about that. Yeah, that's exactly right. Which you could never pull off. I couldn't really muster it up. I gave it my own college best. You would get about 20 seconds worth of rage going and then that would be it. It would be really funny.
    45:32
    I just don't have the lung power to yell anyway. Yeah, true. Because you would start off all totally hot and bothered. You'd be like, I can't believe what they did. Well, you know, I guess we'll get over it.
    45:47
    That was a good old days, huh? Oh, so then eventually it got to the point where. Yeah, me and Jared were just like, you know what? Waiting a month. We miss too many things. Too many announcements pop up. Too many things happen in the pinball. It feels like we're behind. And we wanted to see if our numbers could increase with the podcast and how many people were listening. and so we came up with the genius idea in September of 2015 to start recording weekly with the idea that, you know, we'll do short podcasts. They'll only be like a half an hour long. How's that working out for us? Yeah, never. Never. It is really pretty much an hour every episode now and that's because that seems to be how it works. It just organically goes an hour.
    46:38
    So, yeah, whatever. Whatever. So yeah. Hey, Jared. Yeah. Guess what? We have a guest, a call-in. We have a call-in? This never happens. What is going on? Hey, joining us from Farsight, this would be Rob, also known as Flippy Floppy. How's it going, guys? Oh, good, Rob. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, no problem. so uh as you know this is our uh our special 100th episode of the uh the podcast and uh we just want to say thank you to you guys at farsight for uh all the info that you give us and uh leak to us and then hope that we don't mention all over the air i'll enjoy the feedback you guys give us so you know it's always fun to bounce information off you guys i'm curious to know uh because i know that a few of you guys at the uh at the studio do it actually listen to the podcast um what are the moments that you guys go yeah when we do the podcast and what are the moments that you go oh god uh i would say those moments are basically when you guys are calling out the bugs and everything like that like you know we generally know all the bugs and when you're calling them out we're like yeah we know if you're talking about bugs on older tables especially because we're like, man, we wish we really could address that and it's like, hey, we can still fix that. But then again, you just spent the past month doing exactly that. Yeah. On what tables we could. We couldn't do it for all of them, but we're definitely making an effort to do it on a lot of the tables. How was that for the entire studio to kind of take that pause? It wasn't the entire studio. and we're still working on Stern and there's a lot going into that but there's a part of the studio that wasn't working on Stern so we're taking that time to go back and fix some of the older tables Did it feel nice to kind of did you feel kind of the weight the pressure come off of you or was it a whole new set of pressure? It was a whole new set of pressure the amount of stuff that we're fixing and doing I'm pretty happy with what we're getting done so I mean a lot of these tables have like pulling new fills to them and everything like that. And then like where we're at with Black Knight is like really exciting. So I'm kind of like excited to get that emulation in going and then get the new play field art in and then get the lights off, you know, looking nice and everything and redo the tuning for that table. So I'm really excited. That would be good because I refuse to play it until you guys do exactly that.
    49:20
    Yeah, that is going to be pretty good. I know. It's very much an often requested table to get fixed, so that's going to make a lot of people happy. Yeah, I mean, the table's been riddled with bugs, and ever since I first started cleaning it, it's just been kind of a nightmare just listening to it. Do you think this might become an annual thing that you guys do, or is this just kind of the one-off and you'll go back to trying to pick things off as you can month by month? Definitely an annual thing. Nice. That's very good. I've been like we've been trying to do two tables every release where we at least address some of the bugs. Yeah. And we're just getting better at it. And with the QA department, it's like that just getting them fixed.
    50:03
    So it's just, it's just getting better and we're just able to address more tables now. So that is, that is excellent news to hear. Well, Hey, we know you're busy. We also know that you've got the, the phlegm bot going all up inside of you. so we just wanted to say hey uh thank you to you guys and uh if it wasn't for farsight spinball arcade we wouldn't be doing our podcast so uh you guys are doing the podcast what's that i said thanks for doing the podcast i love listening no we we have an absolute blast doing it and uh we appreciate all you guys's support too oh yeah thank you all right thanks rob talk to you later thanks rob yep have a good one well that was really cool that he called in Yeah, it was awesome. We love Rob. And it goes without saying, we love the guys up at Farsight. We love their work.
    50:59
    And, you know, for any amount of complaining that we do about the game, it is so wrapped up in how much we love the game. Yeah, we do it because we're passionate about it. And that's why we identify bugs and things that we know would make things better. And as Rob says, you know, they know that they know about the bugs. and they don't like us telling it.
    51:23
    It's one of those things too. Prior to Pimble Arcade coming out, I was playing Uncharted 3 non-stop and I was playing either Guitar Hero or Rock Band or DJ Hero. Those were my go-tos. That's all I played. And then all of a sudden this game comes out on PS3 for me. I didn't have a phone that could do it yet by that point. But it came out on PS3, and I completely stopped playing those games like Cold Turkey. I could not get enough of – and we're talking six tables. So it was playing – and I wasn't playing Black Hole.
    52:07
    It was rubbish when it was first released. Yeah, it was rubbish. and I was, so it was a Theater of Magic and Ripley's and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Then that first table pack, I believe, was Bright Earth Pinbot and Medieval Madness. Yes. So not a bad follow-up DLC, really. Yeah, so I mean, I was just playing the crap out of those. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's why it's, and I always say, if you loved the game back then, you can't help but love the game now because it's vastly improved since when it started. It is just one of those things where, and I think we all kind of come to this point and then you have to move past it where it's, you think about the potential of the game and you think about, oh, wouldn't it be great if, and then you realize, okay, you know what? I'm asking the game to be something that it isn't. I need to accept the game as it is. And once you reach that kind of point, then you just kind of go into this flow of, this is all good. I like this. This is fun. It's kind of like expecting Zen to... Wouldn't it be great if they made a table that was completely real-world based and didn't have any animations on it? Well, that ain't Zen. That's not Zen. Yeah, that's right. They'll never do that. No. So, yeah, I think people get, because of their passion, they get too tied up in what they think is necessary to make the game better. And the fact is that it's not the priority of the studio. Their job is to preserve pinball. Yeah. And every single table that they have released to date has done that. It's preserved the fact that you can actually play these tables digitally with the sounds and all the lights and everything like that, working the way they should, except for maybe some of the scripted tables.
    53:57
    But, you know, they all do exactly that. We've got 80 tables now. That's a pretty amazing arcade to walk into virtually.
    54:08
    So, yeah. I have to say, as an outsider looking in, so to speak, now, because I haven't played the game very much, but I'm really impressed with what I've seen, you know, the bugs they've been fixing and all the work that they've done to polish it up lately. I have to say it's pretty impressive. And the new tables they've been adding have seemed to kind of want to lure me back in a little bit with some of the old school stuff, you know, like Paragon coming. and some of the EMs they've added and stuff. So I'll have to give it another whirl sometime. I just have so many games now, you know? Right. Yeah. So it's hard for me. And having my own pinball machine now in the house, it's like, hey, I can just play that when I want my pinball fix and stuff.
    54:51
    Hey, Jared, guess what? We've got yet another phone call coming in. Oh, another one? And this one is also from Farsight. This would be Mike Lindsay, the community manager, among many other things.
    55:04
    Hey, Mike. Hey, what's up, guys? Well, you know, we're just recording this 100th episode. That's all. Yeah. I know. Congratulations on that. Thank you very much. The question that we also have talked to Rob, and so we're going to throw this to you, the same question that we threw to him, which is, what is the part about the podcast that you're like, yeah, you enjoy hearing and are there parts of the podcast you go, Oh God, please stop talking about that.
    55:34
    Well, honestly, I don't think there's anything I don't want to hear about. And, and obviously I think my favorite is just, no, we might have lost him. I think Mike is actually in the car. He is in the car looking at the, you know, there he goes. Now we back. Okay. Well, you, You froze right on your favorite part is. Well, my favorite part is just hearing about us, hearing about pinball, obviously, man. Pinball is the best thing. Well, we certainly enjoy talking about it, as you can tell.
    56:07
    How has it been trying to do both the Stern Pinball Arcade and Pinball Arcade at the same time? It's definitely been hectic, but fun. It's exciting to get the new Stern table. I was going to say, your collection gets a little pricier there at the studio with those tables coming in, huh?
    56:30
    Yeah. Has there been a table that is on your wish list? I mean, obviously you can't discuss what's coming up in Season 7, but is there, after this many tables that you guys have put out, is there anything that you're still just like jonesing for that you hope to get put into the game, whether it be one of the Stern tables or the regular Williams Valley kind of variety?
    56:53
    I think, I mean, I always say this. I really want to have Metallica in the game. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's one of my favorites. And I'm not really 100% sure if we're going to be able to do that or not, but if we are, that's going to be amazing. We keep on thinking that it is just because of the fact that they're doing the Vault Edition, and that seems to be like it would open up the opportunity again. But, you know, that's just us speculating. Yeah, that seems like it would be pretty exciting. Yeah, but older tables, what do you think for the older tables? It's really hard because we've done, you know, I'm trying to think, though. Jurassic Park, you know, is what people are asking for, and it's something that I think I would enjoy having. Mm-hmm. We get the fans pretty excited. Johnny Mnemonic. Yeah, that would be fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. What about you guys? you know well for me my standby is always roller games um i'm not gonna be happy till that's in there but uh i i always say my holy grail table is for you guys to get to nba fast break oh yeah that's actually i would say my the one that i really want especially if you're the link bingo is to be able to have it linked and play against somebody that way i think would be so fantastic because very few people yeah very few people have ever played it linked in real life so no I certainly haven't I've played a lot so I've only played it once linked in Pitcher yeah it kind of adds a whole different flavor yeah definitely I think for me it's probably Banzai Run purely because it's a unique table and there's not a lot of them around from what I understand they're a little bit rare what kind of what do you guys got to coming up for well I mean with you it's always traveling to these various shows what are your next shows you've got to go to I assume like California Extreme is probably going to be coming up Hey, can you hear me? Oh, yes There we go, yeah, we're driving, it's kind of spotty out here Yeah Are you actually driving down the mountain at the moment?
    58:48
    Yeah, we just got down to the bottom and we're just pulling into a shopping center to get the last minute stuff for the trip Hey Mike, I just want to say thank you for the support that you've given us you gave us codes when we were doing game of the month or table of the month, tournament of the month whatever I was calling it back then and you guys have been always very generous with the info. So just thank you so much. You guys definitely are a key component to our podcast. Right. Well, you guys are very welcome for everything if you can hear me, and I just also want to thank you guys for all the coverage, and congratulations on your 100th episode, and I'll talk to you when I get back. All right. Thank you so much, Mike. Talk to you again soon. See you later. All right. See you guys. And that was Mike Lindsay from Farsight, the community manager among many other tasks that he does.
    59:45
    Yeah. But if you ever go to a show and see the Farsight booth, Mike is going to be one of the guys that's always manning the booth. Yes. He's good people. All right. Well, obviously, talking to Mike in the car, that can pose some issues now and then. Oh, yeah. it's the uh the joys of being a community manager on the road yes but we appreciate all the same yeah um so yeah uh before he called jeff he started to mention pinball when we first started this we dreamed of having our own machines yeah we sure did and i i uh i was kind of lucky as a kid i grew up my parents had an old em that we had i think we picked up at a yard sale or something garage sale yeah and uh yes we had that back in the day and i used to just sit on that you You know, just sit in front of that thing. I'd even like do my homework on it, use it as an actual table, you know. It was like a fixture in our living room. So I was just like, you know, pretty much attached to the thing. It was just like my childhood, basically. So I'd always dreamed of having another one. And, you know, I'd been shopping around at Craigslist for the last few years and moved around a lot. So that makes it really difficult when you're moving across the country. It's not exactly easy to transport a machine across with you. No way. So I figured, you know, I'm finally settled in here in California. and I figured it was a good time to test the market a little bit.
    61:04
    And I found a pretty good deal on an old Gottlieb that I – I really like the wide bodies. There's just so much to shoot for and everything and stuff. So I found a good deal on a circus, and the guy delivered it and everything. I was like, yeah, I'll pull the trigger on this one because I've been shopping around and really hadn't seen too many good deals as far as in my price range because I didn't want to spend over like – I was looking at even 500 bucks or less if I could pull anything off, which is a little tricky. So is Circus an actual EM or is it a solid state? No, it's a solid state. It's right on the edge, you know, 80, I think it was. So it's like a very early Gottlieb System 1 sort of thing. Yep, yep.
    61:49
    It's a tank for sure. It's a beast, man. It's the extra wide body, so it's even wider than it. So it's like practically square. it's uh it's pretty gargantuan but uh the same era as genie it is the same era as genie and uh what else there's a there's a couple other ones too trying to think off the top of my head such a beautiful a beautiful era pinball where the artwork is just amazing i guess it's the same guy who did the original slimer for ghostbusters back in the day oh wow did that work oh really yeah so a chicago guy used to do a lot of old comic books and stuff so this is one of his last pins i guess so uh yeah so that's kind of cool just have a little bit of that history there the thing i love about that era of tables is the the play field is so immediate like it's so close to the glass that you feel like you're right there it's almost like when you know as a kid if you try to draw a pinball machine you don't draw any depth into the play field it's just like always like things sticking out from the glass right it reminds me of that like that era of table everything is just there it's just really nice and there's so much going on in the play field i mean almost every time i look at it i see something new like you know there's like little giraffes and clowns there's probably like 20 different clowns scattered around so there's just so much uh depth to the actual art too as well because everything's kind of layered around and that was all like you know they didn't have photoshop and stuff back then so it's all just you know the dude just went crazy with the play field. It's really cool. And the back glass as well.
    63:20
    And it's still working pretty well for you? Yeah, working pretty well. I just had the initial maintenance here. I get the flippers up to snuff and everything. My roto target's kind of been acting up a little bit. Oh, it's got a roto in it. Very nice. Yeah, but it's kind of a bear to deal with as far as repairing it though, I guess. They're very hard to maintain. Yeah. The guy I had working He told me he only knows like maybe one guy who can actually fix those. And you got to take it out and ship it off to him. Oh, right. Yeah. So it's kind of a huge ordeal to get that fixed. It still scores and everything. It just doesn't always spin completely. Okay. It's sticky. Yeah, exactly. And it's a little hard to get the ball because it's all the way up at the top left. You think about where Genie, where those top left drop targets are, the two up there. That's where the roto target is on this, and it's got a couple flippers up there. They're closer together, but it's a little hard to hit that roto target anyway, so it not essential to scoring so to speak I mean It like a nice feature but not really Yeah it a nice feature but you can still totally enjoy the table without it So which is what I been doing So yeah as far as restoring and stuff I kind of like the old as far as you know the cabinet and the backless I kind of like the old kind of weathered look to it. Yeah. So I'm kind of leaving it as is. Well, that's what I'm discovering is that although I completely appreciate a table that's been blinged out and just looks absolutely gorgeous and the corners are so sharp you can cut yourself on them, I know that I will never pay that much money to have it put into that. So I need to make peace with the player's look and enjoy things that way. So long as they play good, who cares what they look like, right? But yeah, the thing is too, I'm the kind of person when I have something that's totally brand new and kind of mint condition, anytime it gets like a tiny scratch on anything, I'm just like, no.
    65:21
    So to have this thing in that shape, I would just be like OCD around it. So as it is now, it's like, hey, give it your best. Nudge the daylights out of it and everything. So I'm totally cool with the way it is. And I think it just kind of looks like something straight out of the early 80s, which is amazing. Perfect. Yeah. Perfect. So I'm very happy with it.
    65:43
    So a few weeks ago, Jared had sent your guys questions that he'd asked you to send in over to Zoltan from, what are they known as? I always want to say Ask Homework. I know that's not what they are anymore. They're called Magic Pixel. That's right. Yeah, that's right. and uh in the in the in the older podcast when bonzo was with us we used to do uh what do we call it something theater um blockade theater blockade theater that's right we would have bonzo read the responses from zolt because zolt didn't feel comfortable enough with his grasp of english to actually do a live interview so that's why we did the um to the question yeah and now they're from we but i think like hungary or something of that nature where Zachary makes Zachariah. But we always found it funny to have Bonzo reading the responses, so they became German. Well, Bonzo wasn't able to join us today, but we have to read them in German, so I'm going to do a terrible accent once more. So we're going old school. We're bringing in Chris's poor impersonations of a German person doing an impersonation of a Hungarian person.
    66:58
    So what could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go on? So here we go with a little blockade theater. I'd love it if we had the music for this.
    67:07
    I'll have to see if we still do. Yes. It might be somewhere. Here we go. Blockade theater. Jared will read the questions. I will read the responses.
    67:18
    Okay. So for the first general question, has there been any progress on Tropical Granada and Top Hand as future tables for Zachary Epinball? The development of Tropical, Granada and Top Hands tables have got stuck because of lacking of materials and information Okay, yeah, I understand Now, how about this, are there any plans to digitize another company's machines once Zacharia is complete?
    67:48
    It would be good to digitize pinball machines from other companies But we rejected this idea because of expected high license fees yeah fair enough okay so here's another question that you can feel free to answer or not but are we going to get any Jersey Jack pinball games of course we are if they give us free license within a week yeah that sounds about right okay folks please send your hate mail to blahblahblockade at gmail.com attention to Chris It's an apology, Zolt, if you are listening to this after that. I can't even call this a German accent. It's like maybe I should do these next ones as an Indian accent and really piss people off. I feel like I'm watching Hogan's Heroes or something.
    68:38
    That's terrible. Be aware of making your talk. Okay, for the front of it, I'm going to read these next responses in a faux Australian accent so Jared can laugh. Oh, here we go.
    68:50
    Okay, so mobile questions now, Zolt. When can we expect an update for the mobile versions? Yes, that'll be a huge update for them. All the new features and table. Oh, my God, that sounds horrible. That sounds like Heretic. Sounds like Heretic.
    69:05
    Okay, we're going to do this as Heretic instead. Okay, excellent. Yes, that'll be a huge update for them with all the new features and tables the Steam version has. Based on your play, you'll be expected to release this update at around August. Of course, some of the new features are required better hardware, so some of the legacy devices will not be supported, such as iPad 1, iPhone 4, etc.
    69:26
    Ah, yeah, right. Okay, so on mobile, will the remake tables be available on mobile with perhaps a potential update?
    69:37
    Why, of course. They'll be available as new DLCs. We'll try to keep graphics and object details of PC version as far as possible. This means the mobile version will have almost as beautiful quality as PC version has.
    69:49
    Oh, that sounds pretty good. We're looking forward to that. Okay, well, how about this one? For mobile, will a further mobile update have achievement-based unlocks, a little bit like the bookkeeping functions in hidden tables as they are on Steam?
    70:03
    It would be great if mobile versions would have the same achievements that a PC version has. Oh, my God, my wife's yelling at me to stop. Okay. She's giggling you. It is terrible.
    70:16
    Okay. It's got to be a different voice, though. The main problem is limitation of achievement number on Game Center and Google Play service between 100 and 200. That means we should remove many achievements or develop an achievement system to handle current 2,000 plus achievements.
    70:39
    What's she saying in the background? She said, am I trying to be Dracula? Okay, I'll do Dracula for this last question.
    70:49
    Oh, dear. Okay, this is the last question, Dracula. Thank God. So for console, will Zechariah Pinball be coming to PS4 or other consoles? And if yes, when should we expect it? We have taken the first steps to develop... Excuse me, I don't know what I'm doing there.
    71:14
    Okay. we have taken the first steps to be developer for specific consoles registration procedures are still under consideration by those companies we will be able to start development of console versions as soon as we have an approval and get development kits we can't tell you any date now thank you we'd like to thank you and all of our fans for your and their constant support well thank you very much Zolt for actual Zolt not Chris' bad impersonation. No, for actually taking those questions again and answering them. I know from my perspective it's been really interesting watching how that particular game has evolved and just the amount of stuff they've pumped into that feature in most cases without actually asking any more money. So if you paid for the original mega pack you just kept on getting tables. It was amazing how they actually did it. So good on you guys for doing that and I think capturing the Zachariah pinball collection and the way you have is if it's just for the fact of preserving it for future generations it's just been amazing so great work guys and keep it up we also want to just real quickly say thanks to Jeff he had to leave he was getting called away he spent way more time than we expected him to stay with us so thanks heaps for coming Jeff absolutely and thank you so much for again everything you did at the start of us doing the podcast because we had no clue. I think, yeah, for sure, mate, you really set the pace for us and showed us how to actually produce something that was worthy of actually being uploaded and shared with people. So, yeah, thank you. You've definitely set the pace there, mate.
    73:01
    While we're on the thank you kick, I want to give a huge thank you to Mike Levitt, who is the man behind Wizard Amusements, who has sponsored us. Going back almost... I wasn't able to nail down a specific, but I think he was within the first... sometime in the first 10 episodes.
    73:25
    Yeah. I believe. It's been a long time. It has been a long time. He basically was like, hey, are you looking for a sponsor? We were like, yeah, we don't know what we... We didn't know what any sponsorship entailed at that point. and he makes these custom shooter plunger rods, which are pretty cool if you ever see them in person.
    73:45
    And so he just basically offered it. He was like, hey, if you want to be giving these things away as promotion, that would be cool. And so we took him up on that, and when we started doing for a year and a half the Table of the Week tournament of the month, we were giving away shooter rods as prizes. Mike was more than happy to provide them, and send them out and get them going. And so that was really, really cool of him to do that. I'll tell you what, if I had a pinball machine, I'd totally get one. They look amazing. The amount of work that goes into each one of them, the detail on them is incredible.
    74:22
    Yeah, I'm going to wind up getting an 8-ball for mine at some point. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's going to look awesome. Does he have anything for firepower? No, I asked him.
    74:32
    Absolutely nothing for firepower. It's a little bit too generic. It is. It's a little bit too generic, really, isn't it? It is. At one point, he was making a Xenomorph head, and so I might actually, if he still has those, maybe I'll purchase that and put that on Firepower just because, you know, aliens. Why not? You could maybe do the planet. Imagine if you could actually paint up the planet. Yeah, but I like what he's really good at is doing these full sculptures. Oh, yeah, like 3D sculptures. And so, you know, the ball is just kind of boring, but, I mean, what am I going to do on A-Ball Deluxe? You've got to have it. It's got to be there. got to be at able um but for firepower i'd much rather have something that would be sculpted than the boring planet um yeah yeah well thanks again mike you're a legend for supporting us for this long and we really thank you uh we also want to say uh shout out and thank you to uh bobby larcher who is or was i should say until just this week uh with zen she was their community manager um She had been willing to do interviews with us and got us a little inside with Zen so that we have a contact point there.
    75:44
    But she's been always very kind to us in the forthcoming with information, too, regarding any of the Zen tables.
    75:50
    Absolutely. So good luck with your future adventures. I'll definitely be following along to see what you're up to. So best of luck. and thanks for all you've done for us with the podcast.
    76:03
    We also want to give a huge shout out to Sven, also known as Xenia. He did just what would have been a monumental task for him. He made it so much easier and that was he created the software that we used for our tournament of the month. I did two tournaments, I believe, where I was just doing it by hand and collating data and it would take me about two hours to get and then post and then have to go back and correct because I would enter something in wrong. And he came up with a spreadsheet that wound up allowing me to do the entire thing in 15 minutes. I know. Incredible. Yeah, I would have given up on table of the month if it hadn't been for him because it was just an insane amount of work. And he just made it exceedingly easier. And he did that all for free. And that was really cool. Plus, he's come on the podcast numerous times and chatted with us.
    76:59
    Yeah, good on you, Sven. You're a legend. We absolutely need to say thank you to Bonzo and to Sean and to Neglectoid and Time Lord Bill and Delta Echo. You guys were all part of those first few podcasts. And although they were rough, they were a hell of a lot of fun to do. And I think in a lot of ways they were formative for what we actually do today. for sure. So yeah, without that initial influx of ideas and voices and both difficulties and joys, I don't think the podcast would be where it is today without it. So yeah, thank you all for what you've done and what you've contributed.
    77:42
    And ultimately, we need to thank you, the listener. We like to say that we do this even if we didn't have any listeners, but truth be told, it's a lot of fun knowing that we have listeners.
    77:52
    Yeah. the amount of joy we get when somebody tweets back at us or sends us an email and tells us they enjoy the show. Just the other day, we actually got feedback from someone saying that, you know,
    78:04
    Farsight should perhaps feature us on their homepage because it was like free publicity for us. And, you know, that sort of stuff. It's great to hear that. It actually makes, yeah, it's really good. Because otherwise me and Jer would just, you know, have Skype sessions weekly and just talk with each other and not bother recording it. But knowing that it's I think the biggest the one moment that I really enjoyed the most out of hearing what the other people listen was when and you'll have to maybe you remember which podcast it was that said it. But they mentioned us and they were like, yeah, they actually talked about like movies for 15 minutes. We can never get away with doing that. We have to talk about pinball the entire time. It was pinball podcast, the pinball podcast. Don and Jeff from the people podcast was saying that. yeah i guess we could do that it's like yes such as the flexibility of blockade yeah that's right i love that little uh sense of jealousy uh with what we do you know we may not do it better but uh have fun yes we get to do a difference so um and again with you the listeners you guys have uh you you're you're willing to go with us on that ride and allow us to or allow me because Jared never goes off on a tangent allow me to go way off the pinball map and into other strange territory so yes and as we get this thrown out from the peanut gallery we have to thank the wives that allow us to step away from the kids for this hour that we do every week so we can record the session 100 hours there bouts of off time.
    79:46
    Now, we're going to close out this podcast in the usual way, which is, hey, why don't you go ahead and follow us on Twitter. Follow the main podcast at Blockade, or you can follow myself at ShutYourTraps. Jared is at JaredMorgz. You do that, you'll get our little asides and notes and what's going on during the week, little comments. If any news drops, we tend to retweet it and pass that along for you. So it's an easy follow. We don't spam you with a ton of junk. Sometimes we go an entire week without anything. So that happens too. Why don't you go ahead and check out our website? It is blockadepinball.com. There you can find all of our past episodes, except for those first 10. Yeah. I'd like to, I was going to say to interrupt you there, I probably do need to give a shout out to the reason why that website exists. And it's the tooling that I use to actually make that website live and it's a blogging platform called HubPress.
    80:49
    I started using HubPress about two years ago and became basically their community documentation person for it and I now know I've actually met the developer when I was over in France and we caught up and had some very nice croissant and pastry over in the park in Paris and to this day it's still great to actually work with a guy and it allows me to quickly get blog posts up and episodes each week using a format called AsciiDoc. It's very quick, it's very lightweight and it would be a lot harder to produce websites of that quality if I didn't have that tool in my arsenal as the post-production engineer on the podcast. So thank you to HubPress and thank you to Anthony, who is a developer on that. Also, a big thanks for everybody that bought our T-shirt because that's what is paying for our domain fee. Yeah. To even allow us to have that. So, yeah, if you if you if you wonder why we have the website and why we were selling T-shirts and why we continue to sell T-shirts.
    82:00
    That is that is the reason, you know, we weren't pocketing this for our own gains. It's purely so that we can keep on doing this. So if you find it that you totally enjoy our podcast and get value from this and you feel like you want to kick something to us, you can either buy the T-shirt and we'll use the money to further years of being able to host this, or you can do what other people have had, which is, you know, there's that old PayPal drop.
    82:29
    Yeah. Which we're never opposed to, but it'll keep us running for a little bit more. Yeah, that's right. And it really helps us keep things moving along. And thank you to all those people who have already chipped in a little bit. Yes. If you want to chip in another way, that is drop us an email. I mentioned it earlier, but our email is blahblahblockade at gmail.com. Tell us what you want to hear about on the show. If there's anything that's popped up in your mind, if there's comments that you've had about a past show, we will bring those up absolutely in a future podcast and share, share because we're always looking for show ideas. So that's another way that you can contribute and we love it. And if you're not in a position to contribute financially or anything like that, you can always leave us a review on iTunes. I know I always say that, but it actually does make a difference in the way the podcast filters on iTunes.
    83:25
    So if you haven't yet and you are listening through iTunes for the podcast, it'd be great. if you could actually just leave us a really quick review. It doesn't have to be long.
    83:36
    It would be really appreciated if you could. Okay, and because he's been begging to and he always begs to be on our podcast, I'm going to let my son join us for this 100th podcast. Come here, buddy, and say hi to everybody.
    83:49
    Hello, everybody. Check out my YouTube channel. No, don't advertise your YouTube channel. Okay, go away. That's enough for you. I did expect him to do that. Jeez. and the V-Duck Gallery are up so I love it right oh my gosh if you do want to check out Mason's YouTube gallery go back through the last couple episodes there's links yeah so yeah have fun with that oh boy okay well hey this has been a lot of fun really appreciated catching up with Jeff next week we will hopefully be talking about Paragon because I'm it's going to be close to being out of beta or maybe even being released. I don't know, but hopefully we'll get some hands on on that, which will be exciting because we haven't been able to talk about digital pinball in some time other than just bug fixes. And that means all those bug fixes will have been put into the game proper. So you guys get your, get your hands on these things too. Yeah. On mobile. I can't wait to try some of these fixes. It's going to be so good.
    84:52
    So yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. I've been playing the beta on Android, but I'll hold my, I'll observe my judgment until next week. Yes, because I haven't got a chance yet. Okay. No. With that, we need to say adios, mahalo. Not that I'm Hawaiian or anything, but it felt like saying that. A virse. What else? I don't know. Sayonara. Ciao.
    85:14
    And see you later, blokes. All right. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye. WizardAmusement.com, the site to visit for custom pinball shooter modes. Easy to install, totally unique. Mention Blockade Podcast for 10% off your order. With Remusement.com. Sales, restoration, customization.
    85:38
    Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blockade is delivered to. We can't improve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and play some pinball.