Here I'm going back to Massachusetts Something's telling me I must go home And the lights all went down in Massachusetts The day I left her standing on her own Hello and welcome to another episode of the Classic Pinball Podcast. My name is George and I'm joined by my co-host Dave. Hello, Dave. Hello, George. And we have a guest today, David Marston. Hello, David. Hi. I guess I can call myself David for the duration, if that will help keep us apart from too many Daves in the pinball business. Stealing my lines already. Yes, thank you. That'll make it easier. So you are David, and Dave is Dave as always. David, I'm going to start with you. Could you please tell the audience a little bit about your background and then your affiliation and role with the Pintastic Pinball Show that's coming up Thursday, November 18th in Sturbridge, Massachusetts? Sure. So I started with pinball in the 1960s. And in particular, I was into pinball before Pinball Wizard was a hit record. And those were dark times back then. Pinball had a bad reputation. People couldn't tell whether it was a form of gambling or, you know, people were paid off for their free games or some other nefarious thing. but after Pinball Wizard was a hit in April of 1969 that got the message out there that pinball is a game of skill and that some people were wizardly at it and of course we're all stuck with that cliche today you know it's been less than a week since somebody asked me so you're the pinball wizard huh? I'm sure you guys get that too I try to frown when And somebody says that and say, I get that kind of a bad word. I get it all the time from customers. Sure. So that was a big turnaround for the industry, of course. And I started operating in 1972, which was riding that wave that began in 1969. But there was another thing happening in the business at that time, new game development. So there were quiz games, there were stand-up drivers, wall games, which didn't last too long, foosball, air hockey, and the very first video games. So I was around as an operator for a lot of that coming and going, and in the case of video games, staying. And air hockey has certainly stayed. Where were you an operator, David? In the seacoast area of New Hampshire and also at Dartmouth while I was attending Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. So that's on the opposite. Yeah. We're talking about what time frame? Early 70s. So starting in 72, first location in Dover, New Hampshire. It was a brief foray into Salisbury Beach, which we could talk about. but I also did some buying and selling acquiring things for more or less a collection but that got going later but I was around before replay and play meter magazines started back when cash box and vending times were the dominant trade periodicals so I've seen a lot happen on the industry side of course and then also I was around for the beginning of organized fandom with the first pinball expo in 1985 and I've attended that and every expo since and I'll be going to pinball expo this year and I was around for the creation of rec.games.pinball, which got started from New Hampshire. You started that? Tom Yeager and I, we sort of played off each other. Tom Yeager did the actual keyboard work, collected the votes to start it. But we were going back and forth. For those of us who don't know, who is Tom Yeager? Well, it's understandable that you wouldn't know him. He was mainly noted in the industry for a brief time when he did the reviews for Playmeter taking over Roger Sharp's column. As Roger Sharp started working for a manufacturer and had a conflict of interest and couldn't do reviews anymore, Tom Yeager did that for a little while. But other than that, he's more a guy who came from fandom and saw that in the online discussion group of the time, which was rec.games.video.arcade, that pinball was taking up more than half the volume. And so he had to split it off. It was just, you know, it's getting too tiring to go to a discussion of arcade video games and see all these subject lines that had the word pinball in the subject line to tell you that this is like the other world that we're sort of cramming into that news group. So it was clear. I'm going to cut in and stop it for a second. Yeah. I could take this conversation in about 20 different directions right now, but I have to pull it back a little bit. Tell us about your affiliation and your role with Pentastic. I want to come back to this. I want to come back to the rec game spin ball too. Yeah, we'll come back to it. But I want to come to the Pentastic piece first, and then we'll go through because it'll give me a few minutes to think about a couple of questions in the direction. And, you know, I'm going to let Dave jump in as soon as you're done talking a little bit about Pintastic. How's that? Well, I'm going to harp on one thing as I get there. So here we go. In the early 90s, along with some other New Robert Englunds fans, we did the New Robert Englunds Pin Fest, which ran for five years. So I had some experience actually running a pinball show, which came in handy in 2014 when I got word of a potential central Massachusetts, New Robert Englunds-wide pinball show that Gabe DiNunzio and Derek Baldessari were starting up. And so I was an advisor to them from the very beginning. And eventually they called me an executive, which means I'm looking at the whole show. And most of what I do for Pintastic is about seeing what one department of the show is doing that may have some impact on another department, because it's such a big show. So, you know, we've got the tournament team. We've got the people who worry about the free playroom and keeping the games up and running. And then we've got prize giveaways for the game bringers. We've got vendors in the vendor hall, the seminar program, and all these different parts of the show. And when we started, those kind of landed on top of each other sometimes in inconvenient ways. So it was clear over time that we had to have more coordination. And that's my specialty. I've helped to run a number of different public events. And so I had a lot of expertise in keeping things coordinated, thinking about logistics and so forth. And we have a lot of good stuff coming for 2021 for Pintastic New Robert Englunds, November 18th to 21st. well I have some questions but I'll let you do the proverbial commercial why don't you tell us about the aspects I've been to the show unless you'd like me to drive the bus I can take us in any direction so floor is yours if you'd like it okay so Pintastic New Robert Englunds is advertised as a family friendly show it serves officially the six New Robert Englunds states but we spread out much farther than that we're the biggest show in the northeastern in the United States now. We get a lot of people from Canada as well when they're allowed in. And we're still waiting to see what will happen this year. But normally we would get them from the maritime provinces, Quebec and Ontario. Plus American states out to Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina and everything closer in. So Sturbridge, Massachusetts, right at the junction of I-84 and I-90. We're about a mile away from exit 6B off I-84. New exit numbers. Drivers take note. And we start Thursday in the late afternoon, except for people who bought our exclusive limited edition passes, which have been sold out for several weeks now. They start a little earlier on Thursday. But we'll be packing in the game room, the vendor hall, the clubs of the area you know we get help from the southern new hampshire pinball club the western mass pinball club the sanctum down in connecticut runs the main tournament the silver ball rumble boston bells and chimes has a tournament for women so we're getting a lot of cooperation we're reaching out to pinball venues all over new Robert Englunds for cross promotion and i think you'll see some interesting new vendors this year. So definitely trying to get something new and fresh every year. An unusual thing this year, because of the great success of the Guns N' Roses pinball machine, we have a Guns N' Roses tribute band playing on Saturday night. No extra charge. It's included with all Saturday admissions. A live band at the show. And all the other stuff. I'd like to ask you a question about that. That would be great. Are you planning on having any special guests for Guns N' Roses other than the band? You know, like maybe the person who designed it? Well, the design credit officially goes to Slash and Eric Meunier, Eric being the employee of Jersey Jack Pinball. and I think Slash is going to be on tour in like New Zealand or something at that time. So we have Eric Minier, though, giving a deep dive seminar. One of our great audio visual extravaganzas. We may have four or five cameras getting all angles on the game. You can go on our YouTube channel. That was going to be another question of mine. You can find that from fantasticnewengland.com. Just click on the YouTube logo in the corner, upper right corner, and you can see some of our past seminars, and in particular when we had a deep dive on Willy Wonka. It was an audiovisual extravaganza as best we could do then. We're planning to do even better this year. Well, that's why I asked you about who might come to the show, because the last show, 2019, you had a couple of the actors from the Willy Wonka movie. so I thought perhaps maybe somebody else might make a guest appearance but 50% is good, I'll take one out of two the other thing is I lost my train of thought, continue, I'm sorry we have Brian Eddy coming probably the most beloved pinball designer ever just because of Medieval Madness Attack from Mars and there are a lot of fans of The Shadow we have connections at American Pinball and we're not sure exactly who's coming from American Pinball but we've been told somebody will come we're pursuing all the factories always trying to get people to come from the factories and breaking news within the past hour before the recording of this show, it was announced that Mark Seiden, big-time supporter of fantastic New Robert Englunds, as well as New Robert Englunds Pinball League, and justly famous for his home brew Metroid pinball game, has joined Jersey Jack Pinball and will be doing design work for them. Wow, that's great. So, breaking news, and we haven't seen what he's doing for our show. Maybe he's going to have to go out to Chicago and get oriented or something. Well, he was a participant in 2019, Dave. Oh, he sure was, and we have, again, the video footage on our YouTube channel to show him talking with Steve Ritchie back then about his game. Steve apparently thought he was a good up-and-coming designer The one thing I want to say about this show to our audience is I went through the games from 2019 that were new at the time I'm guessing that most of the manufacturers will be represented at the show, but games like Munsters, Oktoberfest, Black Knight Swords of Rage, Deadpool, Willy Wonka, those are all fairly new back in the day. And it made for a great show, gives people the opportunity to play games they might not be able to play on location. Sure. And you might remember even a couple of years before that, when we had the first public showing of a game from Stern Pinball. So between automated services and CoinTaker, the dealers and distributors, they work with the factories, and certainly the factories know this is a great showcase. So they're working their end. And then on the collector side, from what I've seen on the registration so far, I know we already have a couple copies of the Guns N' Roses pinball promised for the show. And you can see what's committed to come when you go to PintasticNewEngland.com and on the Free Play Games menu, just click on Free Play Game List, and you'll see all the games that have been registered so far. We try very hard to get people to bring games from their private homes or their showrooms or whatever from all over New Robert Englunds, New York, New Jersey, etc. and we have a good range there I can see we have some EMs already on the list some recent games and a game from 1932 on the list so the full gamut of pinball and that's just as of the time of this recording with much more to come I think I would guess that some of your distributors would bring some of the newer games like Halloween Ultraman, Mandalorian, Godzilla, those seem to be, you know, great for now. That's certainly our hope, and I expect that they will, whatever they can spare from their committed sales, or they will make an arrangement for someone to pick up their game at the show with possibly a discount. If it can be in the showroom floor until Sunday, then it works for everybody. We get a new game just taken out of the box at the show, and then the person takes it home. We're also doing very well on the custom games this year. So Zach Fry is bringing his poker game that he's been posting about on Pinside and the Pincraft game from Brian Smith. and I think we'll have a good showing of the custom games, especially with the news now about Mark Seiden getting a job in the business on the strength of showing his homebrew game at our show. So you keep watching the list. Ryan McQuaid, I have to mention him. Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball Game, built from scratch. that's coming to the show. He was a big winner back in 2019 if you listen to our second show, Dave, I think, right? Yeah. So that's what's coming in the free playroom as of now. Good range of games and we're just warming up there. For the audience who's potentially able to bring a game to the show, note that you get an extra bonus point if you register before October 24th and we also give out bonus points for games designed by our guests like Brian Eddy and Eric Meunier and our guest artist Kevin O He's done art for so many games. It's going to be easy to rack up bonus points this year. So get those games ready, folks. How's it looking for, for selling tickets so far, so far, that kind of thing as the, the LEs had sold out. Yeah, the LE sold out a long time ago, and the premiums are selling well. So the real hardcore pinball people who are planning to make this a major excursion or whatever, take the days off, make it a big vacation period, they're all signing up. and you know later on we will get the more casual people people from near stirbridge who just decide on a whim to come but right now the emphasis of the people who are into pinball are going to bring games uh they're participate in our tournaments now we have no control over the point system or when IFPA rankings and such kickback in. But it's still going to be a strong tournament, and the bells and chimes are anticipating that the women's tournament, they'll have to cap the registrations. So that's the plan we're going with. And I think our next email blast will probably give the details for the women competitors who want to get in on the women's tournament. The women's tournament will run Sunday this year, so that makes scheduling a little bit easier, especially because the band Saturday night is going to compress some of the Saturday night activities, and we're still working on the logistics of that. What is the name of the band? Called Welcome to the Jungle. As far as I know, they play nothing but Guns N' Roses tunes. I wonder if they have a YouTube channel out there. Well, we're on Facebook. Just start from there and see what you can find. Good segue. do you know if the tournament is going to be broadcast on YouTube? I expect so. I've been in some contact with Mark Patnod, who streamed it before on his backhand pinball Twitch channel. And as far as I know, we're on track for that to happen again. I wonder if our Dave's friend, acquaintance of mine, but I'll consider a friend. Eric Stone is going to be a speaker for the upteenth year. I guess he's done it quite a few times. We have something radically new that is a new groundbreaking seminar about competitive pinball play. Watch the next email blast for the details. Oh. It's never been done before. This is a seminar on competition in pinball, the likes of which has never been done before. And what is this taking place? What day? Well, we'll have to have it Friday morning because it is something that will help even the top players. And I can think of certain top players and I watch them play and I say, I think that guy has a weakness. He could be even better than he is. And you would benefit from going to this seminar. So no matter how good you think you are now, world-class player, top 10 player in the world, you'll still learn something new that will help you play better at this seminar. Okay. Dave, you have anything else or do you want to backtrack into your RGB question? RGP. What did I say? Yeah, RGP, Rec Games Pinball. Let's try that one more time. Red, green, blue. Sorry, heads in another place. Go ahead, Dave. Yes, so Rec Games Pinball, I was introduced to that in the early 90s. When was it actually formed? When was it actually started? The official start was November 20th, 1990. but as I say Rec Games Pinball was a split off news group from rec.games.video.rk which was getting overloaded with pinball content I think I was around at the same time I kind of remember that happening back then a lot of early players early voices and people talking about things and I was even around for the beginning of Joshua Clay's Guides when he was first trying to get talent on board to share information on how to fix your pinball machine he's looking for talent um who knows how to fix what and compile it all and those great guides he put out years ago well you got me on a you know one of my uh campaigns is to use the right software for the right purpose so something where you're trying to build up knowledge and get the combined wisdom working together is more appropriately done on a wiki than on a discussion forum so if you think about whether it's rec.games.pinball which uses usenet news software or pinside or other modern discussion forums which are a web application they don't really put the knowledge into a package where all you can do is go into a thread and just read the entire thread and make your own conclusions after slugging through page after page of postings. postings. So I'm always campaigning to try to get people to think through the way they're trying to convey information online or mix of online and offline and put it out in the proper format. So PinWiki exists and is still going on. In fact, rec.games.pinball is still going on. our top technical guy Tony Zezek still posts a lot on rec.games.pinball for example. That's where you can find Tony on RGP? Yep. Oh, I sent a word out on one of my projects. Now I've got to hunt him down. One of the things about Usenet is that it was designed to be as durable as the internet itself so it's not susceptible to being shut down in the conventional sense it can it can be impeded just like internet traffic can be impeded but it's not like there's some guy sitting somewhere who can say i'm tired of this and pull the plug it just goes on forever that's the structure of Usenet. There's no central point, meaning there's no single point of failure. And no real censoring then, kind of Wild West still, right? Or no? Right, yeah. It's technically possible for one site that's passing along news to not pass along things that it believes are irrelevant to the topic area. Okay. But what I've seen lately, there's spam there. So spam does get through. Yeah, I'll still go back there once in a while. I definitely go to Pinside first, especially when you do any kind of search for any kind of weird problem you have, whatever. Pinside threads definitely come to the top of a search like that. So Rec Games Pinside, I noticed over the past several years, have been going down to the bottom of a query to find out, you know, difficult problems or best practices for whatever. Pinside stuff comes up right away. And while we're talking about online forums, I could also mention Tilt Forums, which has a lot less traffic than Pinside, but does seem to get the better discussions related to tournament administration, tournament director questions, and to some extent, streaming of tournaments. So it's good technical material on tilt forums for those who are looking to set up a rig. I'm laughing at you, David, because you're breaking the rules. One of the topics that podcasts are supposed to stray away from are tournaments. But you know what? We don't. So that's staying. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess I have floated the idea. We break all the rules. We're not supposed to talk about ourselves. We're not supposed to say how we got into pinball. We're not supposed to talk about tournaments. But you know what? I don't care. Dave doesn't care either. We talk about it. Yeah, I don't care, especially since we haven't really talked about it before. It's something different. So why not? well i sometimes float the idea that there are two worlds of pinball the tournament world is separate and they're hanging out on tilt forms and anytime i say that uh most people try to say no no that's not really true but then walk away yeah there's this there's evidence that you know the people who hang out tilt forums are in a different world hey i'm a youtube watcher but i gotta confess i've never been on tilt forums and i don't know why just never have yeah if you got on there you'd probably say oh it's just a bunch of tournament players and then that's okay no talk of restoration or anything like that over there so when you were Let's go back to when you were operating and putting games out there in New Hampshire and so forth. What were the titles, for instance, that we would know that you put out there? So what kind of EMs, like Gottlieb stuff or Wedgeheads or what titles come to mind? Yeah, that's exactly it. The first game I got new in the box was Gottlieb Wildlife from the end of 1972. That's with Tarzan kind of the guy in the front, that one there. Yeah, a non-trademarked person who one would think of as Tarzan. And we had a Bally Fireball, Williams. I certainly remember getting the – I wanted the Williams Swinger, but they pulled a switcheroo. Swinger came out before FunFest, and when it was doing well, they said, we've cut off sales on Swinger, but we can sell you the FunFest, the four-player instead of the parallel two-player. It's only an extra $120, which is, you know, we're talking prices at that time were around $1,000. So this might be like $1020 versus $900, say. so it's a substantial extra cost and not having that many locations that needed a four-player game but and that was uh joe dylan was the sales guy at seabird north atlantic distributing in randolph massachusetts so uh that operating business dealt with all the distributors you know we didn't go exclusively with one distributor for everything, which some operators do. But spreading out the business turned out to be a good idea, buying new and used games from the Bally distributor, the Williams distributor, and the Trimount Automatic was mainly a Gottlieb distributor, but they officially represented Chicago coin for all the good that at them. Chicago Coin. Okay. Not really many good stellar games from them. Yeah. And then, of course, Allied Leisure made their first very unfortunate attempt to get into pinball with their shaker ball games. Oh, those were the uprights, right? Yeah, the upright pinballs. Like a large, a wide So you shook it back and forth Yep, wider and deeper arcade cabinet And You had shaker handles that could Move like Valley Nudgee of 1947 Or whatever that was You could Move the play field around a little bit To really put some Extra oomph in When the ball bounces off a Rubber ring or something and then we started to see the foreign manufacturers decide that they could actually send games into the United States which seems like a crazy idea given how much the European countries loved the American-made product and and yet the pinball business just got so frantic, so overheated through the 70s that companies like Zecaria, Playmatic, Sagasa Sonic, those companies were sending games made in Europe into the United States. Now we sure know Zecaria. I always thought it was Zacharia. Are we sure about how you pronounce that one? I'm sure. Remember that, I mean, I've done a lot of things in pinball. One of the things I did is I worked extensively with Federico Croce on his book about pinball machines for Italy. So I got to ask him, you know, how do you pronounce these Italian names? Okay, cool. I have a question, David. What was the best earning pinball machine you ever owned on route or in an arcade? That would be Gottlieb Big Indian. And when we look at it now, it's not really explainable. You know, you can look at the four that they remade in solid state and say, well, that's what they thought. Based on the factory point of view, they would have said the best electromechanical Gottliebs were Orbit and Eldorado. And then Fast Draw became Amazon Hunt. but Big Indian did better now certainly El Dorado was a great game and I have a gold strike the Adaball version in my collection now that was just the ultimate in shooting way long shots way to the back of the field with those drop targets the 10 drop targets way at the back and as we know Guttlieb made 7 different titles with that playfield layout so So come again. Whoa, whoa, stop. Come again. One platform had seven different titles. Yeah. The layout of El Dorado was also Gold Strike and Lucky Strike as a single target. Target Alpha. Target Alpha and Canada Dry and the two-player Solar City. Yes. And then later it was the solid state El Dorado City of Gold. So those are the seven. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You pass. Terrific. I didn't know that, but you got all seven. Big Indian sounds like they came out with the concept first, and then Bally said, oh, yeah, we're going to put out bow and arrow in 75. Well, kind of like that scene. Hard to know with Bally. I mean, Bally certainly was learning the value of licensing. They were just sort of exploring it in 1975. and sometimes they would slavishly imitate Gottlieb, certainly Circus and Big Show are very derivative of Jungle and Wildlife, and then sometimes they'd go in their own direction. So I think there was a lot of tension in ballet at the time about whether to go with the tried and true copying Gottlieb or go with what really caused excitement for ballet like Fireball. All right. So, Dave, going back to your years back in the early 70s, mid-70s, I guess late 70s and 80s, maybe? Oh, early and mid-70s. Early, mid-70s. So tell us about operating these games, what you operated for Gottlieb Equipment. What was your heavy hitters for big, overflowing cash box full of quarters? You know, any kind of memories of that and what games really, you know, struck it rich for you kind of thing out there? You know, what games were stinkers? You know, that kind of stuff. Some anecdotes from the field. Well, one thing I think my business partners and I were able to avoid some of the worst stinkers like Gottlieb Pro Football because we were tipped off by the distributor to where they had their test pieces. So we go down there and see the games ahead of time. You know, like we saw the Jack in the Box before they were even taking orders on it. So we knew that was going to be a great game You know the first of the 10 drop targets games And four long flippers So this is a time when long flippers were displacing short flippers, we should remember. And high hand was pretty good. Not great because, as everybody now knows, once you drop all 16 targets, it's just flailing around with very little going on. Captain Card was a lot better, and we were able to get a Captain Card the year after. Yeah, great game. I had two of those. Those are great games. Yeah. So I would say we did pretty well in avoiding the clunkers on the pinball side. For Salisbury Beach, we had to get some arcade pieces. the Allied Leisure Super Shifter was that big cash cow that you spoke of. That was the number one earner every single day that whole summer. Summer of 1974 at Salisbury Beach. Really? Well, you have to think that driving games were evolving from the Chicago Coin Speedway was kind of a breakthrough game, 69, where you were playing a projected image. That's the one with the screen, right? That's the one with the screen, right? Yeah. Or projector, right? Not a video game. Right, projector. And he had the steering wheel and gas pedal, and they were slowly building up. So Chicago Coin did Speed Shift and all these other, you know, motorcycle. They embellished the idea year by year. but Allied Leisure made the sit-down one where they went to the automotive aftermarket and got a genuine car seat and had a gear shift so you had to you know it's just a drag race but a very compelling idea for a solid state non-video game. I actually haven't pulled up right now what year is this again 74 so i've been pulled up now i think i remember when this came out and i think i put a lot of money in this how much did you was this a 50 center was this when they broke the rule and got more money out of a game uh i going from memory i think that was a straight 25 cents for two drag races but they're very quick so you know it's a Dollars per hour could be very high on that game. So you're trying to beat the computer, the game that sets a certain time you're trying to beat it? Yeah, you're racing against the computer-controlled car or something. But people can pull it up online, and arcade-museum.com has a lot of information about arcade pieces. I remember this one, but I remember even more. the one that almost had like a spinning disc inside the machine. You don't really see it as a customer, but as a tech. It's like a disc spinning and an armature going across the thing, and it would actually show on almost a movie screen kind of thing. You're looking at this car. You know what I'm talking about? You got to sit down. I think that's the Chicago coin one he's talking about, isn't it? Well, yeah, the disc on Chicago coin. You're looking at a road that has constant curvature because it's a flat disc. So that's the first one being Speedway. And then, as I say, they had several variations after that. And what year is that one with the disc? 69. Oh, wow. Wow. I remember that being in the bowling alley. That machine just cleaned up. I remember that game being in the arcade in the late 70s, still taking money. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it allowed Chicago Coin to keep going up through 76. That plus the twin rifle. The twin rifle had been done before, but not successfully. And Chicago Coin figured out the way to do it. And so their twin rifle was another big success for them. Do you remember a game called Bally Roadrunner? Oh, sure. So that was one of about five upright arcade pieces that Bally did under their brand name. And this is around the time they acquired Midway in 69. And eventually they kind of settled out that Midway would do the games like that, you know, the undersea raider type games also uh sea rescue and things like that uh but bally had five upright arcade pieces that were electromechanical so roadrunner was one of those where you had you had a black light image of real sculptures of cars and the illusion of the road uh rolling underneath it. Sort of a hologram kind of thing, right? A little bit? Well, it's just a split screen thing like a lot of rifles had. So the dimensionality was that you were actually looking at an actual sculpture of a car. David, did you run most of these games out of Salisbury Beach? I should also mention that my group was closely affiliated with some other operators who were based in Salisbury. So some of the games after the summer was over went out on a carnival circuit, like to the Topps Field Fair and places like that. And we had plenty of foosball tables because another operator had actually gone to cut a deal with Rene Pierre directly from France. And for the listeners from outside New Robert Englunds, And in New Robert Englunds, the French table is the foosball table. You just never got anywhere with tournament soccer or any of those solid rod things. It was the French table, telescoping, lightweight rods, metal men, and hard nylon balls for a real cutthroat game of foosball. I learned something today. I had no idea. So foosball was big. There were foosball leagues and stuff. And the ultimate story, really, you know, I did a presentation for Long Island Retro Gaming Expo last year where I dredged up all these memories of the arcade side of it. The ultimate game is air hockey. Brunswick brought out air hockey at the MOA show in 1972. It was later to be known as the AMOA, but back then it was just the MOA. And it was the hit of the show, not Pong. It was air hockey. Air hockey continues to this day. Air hockey is a trademark owned by Brunswick, but licensed to Dynamo. So Dynamo makes genuine air hockey tables now. and other companies then as now have you know pseudo air hockey names air cushion hockey or air table hockey or something to not infringe on the trademark but but we know what we mean air hockey and when air hockey came out uh it was a sensation a lot of those early air hockey games before they figured out about the playing surface you would wear down that surface some of them turned into just pegboard the holes got so big wow but uh u.s billiards with their stainless steel top uh kind of showed the way that was the 1976, the stainless steel top. It can dent, but if the dent is not near the air hole, it doesn't matter. I'm guessing you saw one or two dented when people got a little bad, let's say. Yeah. In fact, Fun Spot in New Hampshire has their SSTs, their stainless steel top U.S. Billiards Air Hockey's now. They're still running them. They run fine. so what year is that again that's been the 76 was when those came out 72 is when the original brunswick air hockey came out with kind of a uh laminate type surface that uh you know it was blue until you played too much and then it would turn brown and so uh brunswick had a few other things to learn their electronics had a lot of problems in the early days but those made so much money that operators put up with it anyway. Well, yeah, those are the days of the overflowing quarters in the cash box that maybe jammed the mechs and said, why isn't this game quarters anymore, right? Something like that? I tend to think of that as the old wives tale going back to the 1930s that I'm saying it did happen once and a million games produced, maybe. But when it did happen, that was just the talk that the manufacturers told the distributors, tell all your operators that it was out of order because the cash box overflowed. I've heard that about the earliest video games. I've heard that about air hockey. It's just a tale that keeps going. well i got real data on it because it happened to me because but but with one of those talking about what what makes a lot of money is uh those horsey rides you get at the you know ice cream stand or whatever the outside horse ride or carousel whatever this one was one of those you know horse ride things the guy called me up at the end no one working this stuff can you work i said sure i'll give it a shot you know and reason being i he didn't have the key for it or something i don't know or lost it so i opened the thing up it's like it was so full of freaking quarters that's that's why it wasn't working it could not take any more it would not it would it's messed up the whole trip switches and everything so um that was actually a real thing did he pay you in the quarters did what he pay me in quarters no he yeah i guess if you leave any game long enough eventually that would happen yeah uh on the pinball side getting back to pinball uh certainly the solid state games came in and uh the big story of the 1970s uh apart from just the conversion to solid state is that atari totally spooked the traditional pinball manufacturers they were so scared of atari so when atari comes out with those ultra wide bodies uh bodies equal in width to the head. The other manufacturers said, we've got to do this because they're Atari and they must know something. And it proved to be bad for the shoulders of many pinball players of the time. I do enjoy a couple games of Ballyparagon, but I can't play that for an hour. just hurts too much uh if you're a six foot two like me they're ultra wide a tall guy can play it though that's interesting so atari was the first with the wide body and then people followed suit the godly genies of the world the paragons of the world the uh stern game that came all later big game wasn't quite so bad but uh williams stellar wars oh yeah they're and uh contact and talk and talk about the the freaking what williams did with those lockdown bars from those bit it's like an 1957 buick uh chrome bumper that would hurt your hand it's so sharp over the years there have been some bad lockdown bars uh i tend to think of most of the ones of this early 60s even when chicago coin came back into pinball in 62 and they had those uh ceramic type corners like this was supposed to be comfortable but no it wasn't and um i i see a lot of those uh the the ones with end caps anything with end caps they pretty much never figured out the right thing to do to make a comfortable lockdown bar yeah like uh the godly stuff from the late 60s early 70s like four square had that it sat kind of tall yeah it was it was an extra piece uh in the earliest stainless steel rail days. Yes. So the oldest pinball that I operated was Bally Wiggler. And that was one of their first multiball games after Capersville. What year was that, 67? Yeah. And short flipper. So that one would be run at one for a dime, three for a quarter. And the idea of, at least in the New Robert Englunds territory, was that we would use the long flippers as an excuse to go to two for a quarter. Now, from what I've seen of add-a-ball games at the time in Connecticut, New York State, which are add-a-ball territories, their long flipper add-a-balls, a lot of those continued at straight dime play. Replay territories is typically two for a quarter. five balls per game would be the standard pricing in the early 70s so solid state was more like the hook to go to three balls per game right three balls per game and that's when you get uh one play for a quarter three plays for two quarters yeah maybe 79 the electronics supported it yeah yeah or or when the dollar coin came out, then the dollar coin could get you five plays. Yep. The SBA, Susan B. Anthony coin. Yep. And Bally pushed that really hard with that special door sticker. Yes, they did. I try to do all my Ballys with sticker appropriate for the year. Was it pushed that year? Because a lot of times you look on their flyers, for Bally flyers at that time, and they don't have the coin stickers on the games. They're just bare stainless steel. But out in the wild, they did many times. So I try to do it appropriate, which one is supposed to be. My partners continued after I left. I got a legitimate job, you know, appropriate to my college education in 76. But that business continued on for a while. And we had the other friendly operators. so there was some trading off of locations and realignments and so forth so on the video game side i can say that the video game i remember where i was still involved on the operation was probably midway gunfight the first one with a microprocessor So all the games before that, you just had row after row of logic chips and everything was done hardwired in the logic. There was no program to be executed. And on the pinball side, maybe Top Card, Gottlieb Top Card, Wedgehead was the first one after I was out. Not sure exactly. So you were never really involved in solid-state games? Not as doing the day-to-day maintenance and stuff. Okay. Which leads me to what's in your collection? Oh, it's mostly electromechanicals. Thank you for asking. I kind of figured that. So what games are in your collection and how many? About 25. I'm thinking of selling off the Flying Circus 62 Gottlieb so I've put that on the list for what I'm bringing to Pintastic some older Woodrail games I've got Chinatown which is a trap hole game Diamond Lil those are Gottliebs Williams Colors and then in the 60s I got the the Skyline and the North Star that came out of Mountain Park in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Is it North Star, the one with the Eskimos on it? Yep. Art Stenholm's Eskimos, yes. A rare game I have is the Lariat that I brought to the 2019 Pintastic show to put next to Ty Waiters' Wild Wild West so that people could see the vast number of differences between the two games. So Wild Wild West is a two-player add-a-ball that by artwork looks parallel to the two-player replay game Wild Wild West. But as far as the rules, it's way different. What do you think of – Yeah. I was going to say, speaking of 50s Gottliebs, what do you think of Criss Cross? Oh, I've enjoyed playing it. I not sure why you asking about that one in particular Do you have that or you don have that game No i i have played it quite a bit uh when it has been at a pinball show because the reason why i asked is i just picked one up and i was gonna and it was a working one too in really nice shape and i was thinking of selling it or trading it or whatever but as i was as i was at the allentown show recently just looking through all the different in the flea market section someone had I think it was a pin game journal a whole bunch of them and just walking by when I saw the one on top it had a whole feature on crisscross and it's like maybe I'll hold on to that game people like this game maybe there's something I'm missing I should hold on to it and restore it up and play it for a little bit and really see if it's going to be something has the bullseye targets a Gottlieb thing where there's concentric target actuators and if you hit it dead center, you get more points than if you hit that metal outer fan thing. Trap holes, so beware. You've got to have your... Oh, those are gobble holes. Gobble holes, yeah. Oh, yeah. You say bye-bye. Bye-bye ball. Yep. You might get 500,000 points for saying bye-bye but uh and trap hole games have a same kind of a mentality that uh do i want to have that ball drop in the hole now and get my 500 000 points or would i like to bounce around some more you know get it 10 000 here 10 000 there kind of thing speaking of these 50s games this game so i wonder back in the day they didn't really have tournaments in the 50s the pinball right right oh the reputation of pinball is so bad back then that i mean the october 57 better homes and gardens with that article about pinball is stealing kids lunch money that was one of the very few magazine articles of the entire decade of the 1950s that said anything about pinball uh 60s were a little bit better you know there might have been 10 magazine articles in national magazines of which five were anti-pinball and five were oh look at these crazy wacky guys who like to play pinball so the the reputation back then it's just wasn't conducive let's say and and how it's turned around now and now you see especially past couple years i've just been seeing it on tv commercials on um sitcoms and different tv shows There's always a pinball machine in the back, or the cast is playing it. There's a lot more of like, this is a cool thing to have. It's not bad for you kind of thing. And this is a lot more accepted and promoted out there these days than years past. Yeah. And it's a little bit surprising because the idea of games that were obsolete on location going into homes goes way back. So I first became aware of pinball because my uncle had one in his basement. It was a pre-flipper game. So it was, of course, made obsolete by flippers. And from my earliest memories, that game was there. It's not like having games in the home is a sudden new thing. and from my operating days, many of those games were sold to home use. You know, if the trade-in value at the distrib wasn't good enough, and this is back when distribs liked to do a pretty good used game business. I think if you look at the billboard and cash box magazines of the 60s and even going back into the 50s, you get a sense of the used game business, particularly for pinballs. Great number of those magazines online now. So you can just read them week by week. You can waste all your time getting lost and catching up on the industry news of 60 years ago. David, do you have any opinion about what we've been calling pinflation? and also did you watch any or pay attention to the captain's auction out of California? Oh, I looked at the results a little bit. Now, that's something where my operator experience provides a balancing viewpoint because operating in the early 70s, this was the time of the real inflation where the dollar was really losing value just across the board. But Richard Nixon had his price controls, but that did not apply at the wholesale level. So those pinball machines. So the single players, I think when I started, the single player was like six hundred ninety five dollars electromechanical single player. And then the next one would come up and it's seven twenty five and the next one would come up and it's seven fifty and the next one would be seven seventy five. and no price controls stopping them. And, you know, we're talking a few months between here. So this was a pretty rapid run up. So compared to that, I just see this, the current thing is like one particular consumable item, a pinball machine, or maybe rent for apartments. There's a couple components of life that are going up very fast, but it's just different from when everything is inflating all at once. I had a little excursion in the stationary business, and any problem with the forest producing paper would be an excuse for the price of all your spiral-bound notebooks to go up from, say, $0.25 to $0.30. Now, think about that percentage-wise. That's a big increase. Inflation now is just one particular fad. I guess I'm more in the mood to sell because of the inflation. Well, you've had to have seen a rapid rise in what they're getting for electromechanicals. You know, Dave and I concentrate specifically on solid state. Dave dabbles in other things as well, but we're dumbfounded. I've only been in the hobby 20 years, but I'm just dumbfounded by the prices. Yeah, well, certainly the California auction. And I thought they were going to tap out the collecting community, just could not raise $7 million for that with all the other stuff that we have to buy. But I guess it got enough worldwide publicity. I'm not convinced it was a collector community that bought that stuff. Oh, yeah, right. That's what I'm saying. I think it's the retail community who just looked at it and said, oh, wow, a pinball machine and bought it. And I had this conversation a couple of days ago. I think a lot of it was under the guise of the banning pinball museum, which some people might have construed as, you know, museum quality pieces, which you and I both know is probably not the fact. But they would at least have some maintenance done to them. So it's not like random operator, you know, the kind of stuff the captain's auction usually auction. auctions is off the route and maybe off the route deservedly so whereas these were in a place that had a high amount of maintenance relative to the amount of play those games got so i would say there's some kind of a pedigree there and as george was saying earlier to me it's like it has the word museum next to it which must mean museum quality it kind of implies things that may not their silly be true right uh and i have firsthand knowledge because i was there you know for the upteenth time our audience has heard this in 2020 january 2020 some of the games played very well there were a lot of games that were certainly subpar so it was it was random but when you have a room with that many pinballs in it extremely difficult to keep up on the maintenance i mean And it's a full-time job, and we all know that. It's not an easy task. But it was just in looking at all the numbers, and Dave and I had first talked about banning just with what we collect over a year ago. And then here we are in September of 21, and everybody and their grandmother knows who Captain's Auction is now. It's kind of funny. I had a customer recently who gave me a call, and she has an Adams family and a Star Trek Next Gen. And she's, you know, she got divorced. She has these games. Had them for the wrong time. I guess they're in nice shape. But I guess she had another tech or something come out there a couple times and they said, oh, do you want to sell them? Oh, you can get, I think he said, oh, you can get $15,000 for that Adams family and $10,000 for that Star Trek Next Gen. And I said, what the heck is that guy smoking? Because these games haven't really gone over by. you know a restoration person they're you know their home use for the past 15 years but you know i just know i didn't look at him yet but i just know that i told her that those are kind of lofty prices even my restored stuff i don't get that price for restored never mind you know out of someone's house so i said you gotta you know um get the expectation of donald but it's like then it got me thinking well is it something that i should buy from her put some time and money into making this really beautiful piece and then what am i going to get on the other end am i going to get 20k for this stuff i mean it's it's weird i had to adjust my adjust all the pricing around these days because just it's insane what people are getting for stuff that's not even restored well i can give you another data point on that so our uh friend of the show ed kelsey uh was at the pocono's auction which happened after the captain's auction just this past weekend as we're recording now um and he said that uh the pins he was selling did very well so there's still uh pinflation for the auctions apparently yeah i would never i would never buy anything like that sight unseen over the internet i have to touch it i have to look at it i have to inspect it i i just that's me this whole rage now of you know i buy a car online it's it's all demographic it's you know hey i'm not allowed to talk about my age but you know i'm uh i'm on the slope i'm on the slope and i'm rolling downhill never mind a car like you can actually go and buy a uh a couch and stuff online now it's like don't you know i kind of want to test that stuff out before you deliver it and you know what i mean so it's all uh i know a lot of these things you had to go see and feel and touch and thing before you uh you know purchase at least that's the old school way of doing things. Well, that's what brings us back to Pintastic New Robert Englunds, where you'll have a chance to see all these games, including in the vendor hall, see what the vendors are selling, and those special toppers, you can see whether you like the effect in person. Come in and experience it, know what it really looks like in your actual situation, so you don't have to just guess. Are you folks Are you driving the flea market this year out in the parking lot? Glad you asked. The idea is that we will wait until we're within Carl Weathers forecast range and make the call. So we might, if the Carl Weathers's going to be good. Yeah. Well, some of these guys would just leave stuff in the back of the truck anyway, so you walk into the truck, I guess. But we're holding the possibility open. I have another question. This is unusual for this show, or at least it's the first time where you've run the show in November. Any talk about going back to the June timeframe, or are we going to look at maybe two shows next year? For 2022, we've already announced that we're doing it in June, starting on June 23rd. So end of June dates as before, and it's Sturbridge again. And I guess we'll see from there. But the November thing, we've had some negatives on that, particularly because we're right after the trade show IAPA down in Florida. And that's interfering with the seminar program, getting some of the factory people. there are going to be some who fly from Orlando straight up to Boston to be at Pintastic so it's not a total loss there but it's it's an issue the whole show calendar was compressed into the back half of the year so you've noted we've had a pinball show like every weekend in October that's going to be really intense and leading up to our show and then Pinsonati in early December is the last of the shows for this year and I expect that the schedule will stretch back out and of course some other shows like West Coast shows that didn't happen at all will probably happen again in 2022 so as far as I can see now the trend is to go back to the classic pinball show calendar of the 2017-2018 era. What was that? That's a good ding because we're up to a minute 30 warning right now, so that's appropriate. Oh, that was breaking news, I think. No, this is the same. That's my texting ding. And the last one told me that Mark Seiden was working for JJP, So sometimes they're useful for the podcast, but this is just more business, more preparations for Pentastic, which takes a whole army, and we're looking for volunteers. So go to pentasticnewengland.com slash volunteer and see if you want to sign up. Before we run out of time, I want to thank you, Dave. Great interview. A lot of terrific information, and look forward to seeing you next month. Yeah, and we can do it again to talk about other classic pinballs. We kind of got into the arcade pieces a lot, but we could certainly talk more about classic pinballs and Adaball games too. Yeah, there's a lot more stuff we can definitely talk about in a future podcast with you. Absolutely. There's a lot of information there. Dave, sign off. All right. Signing off. Classic Pinball Podcast. George here. Over there. Dave here. And David Marston as our guest. See you in the pinball future, folks. Take care. Dave! Who? Dave! D-A-V-E! Yeah, Dave! Dave! Right. Dr. Dave's Pinball Restorations restores games to look and play like the first day they hit the arcade. Buy your piece of your childhood back with one of the following games in our restoration queue. If you're looking for that late model pinball machine, well, we currently have three available. A Stern NASCAR, the rare limited edition Dale Jr. with only 600 made. Bally, we have a Doctor Who and a Twilight Zone. And for your classic pinball fans, we have the following ballys. A Kiss, Supersonic, Paragon, Skateball, Flash Gordon, Embryon, and Fireball 2. For classic stern, we have Sea Witch, Stingray, and Nineball. For Williams, we have a Firepower. Atari, we have a Superman. Gottlieb, Old School EMs. A Top Score and a Flipper Pull. and for Bally Old School Electromechanicals, we have a Bally Captain Fantastic and a Bally Flip-Flop. Which we live in Makes you give in and cry Say you're living red, dry Living red, dry © BF-WATCH TV 2021 When you got a job, you got to do it well