Coming up on this episode of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball, we've got an interview with Doug Polka, who's the Pinberg Pop-O-Tournament Director. We're going to talk about his business, Kickback Pinball Cafe, as well as Pinberg Replay FX. We've got news and updates, and we're going to do a revisitation of Black Knight, Sword of Rage, all that and more, coming right up. Double Super Jackpot! I need a ramp. I need a loop. I want targets I can hit. I need the scoop. I need a dog as super jackpot as my wife. That's right. Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. Boom shakalaka! Boom shakalaka. It's another month. It's another Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball. Welcome, everybody. Nick, how's it going? Going. What is this? We're coming up on a year of being on lockdown, so happy anniversary. Yeah, I guess. A year of trying to figure out how to do this remotely. I think we got it down pretty pat now. Yeah. Just in time to throw it all in the garbage and hopefully go back to doing it in person. Maybe someday. When? In the fall? Maybe in another year, maybe, you think? Yeah, I'm never going to get my vaccination at this rate. Yeah, we're low on the priority list, so it's going to be a while. I'm glad to be low on the priority list. It means I'm young and healthy, right? Exactly. It's good. I get to keep working from home. I'm not going to argue about that. I like that. But in the meantime, we've got lots more pinball to talk about, sort of. It's a light month in news, but we've got some stuff to talk about. We've got Doug Polka joining us. but for first, let's get into thanking our partners without them. This show would not be possible up first, the pin stadium, the premier sponsor of Buffalo pinball, also the premier lighting solution for your pinball machines. Check them out at pin stadium.com. Use coupon code 10 Buffalo to save 10% on your lighting kits from pin stadium. 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You get together, connect, talk to your friends about pinball stuff. Look up the Top 100 Undisputed 100% Accurate Resource. Everybody always agrees with the number one game on the Top 100, so check that out. But JerseyJackPinball.com, where we love their pinball machines. Nick and I have a number of them each. The hot new Guns N' Roses pinball machine, it's blowing up the charts. So check them out. PinballEDU, if you're looking to win a pinball machine, our friend Joe Sae runs a pinball raffle. And every month he gives away a brand-new Stern pinball machine. PinballRaffle.org is the link. You can go there and support a great cause and hopefully get yourself a pinball machine. So Community Beer Works, communitybeerworks.com, our local beer sponsor, they've got two pinball-related new beers. They have one. They have a Snozzberry beer that they just posted on social media yesterday. So if you've got a Willy Wonka, you can get a Snozzberry to go with that. They also have a Cargo Shorts beer because you know you've got a pair of Cargo Shorts in your closet. So communitybeerworks.com, they know what's up over there. Tilt Cycle glad to have Dan back fellow Pittsburghian I think that's what you call him down in Pittsburgh with Doug makes great art if you've seen any of our game room tour videos you've seen the playfields that Nick and I have on our walls get them from TiltCycle.com he does a great job Comet Pinball if you want to light up your machines light up all the inserts GI make them look good like I have on my Adams family and Doctor Who that I've streamed recently you can go to CometPinball.com for awesome lighting solutions over there. Pinball Mix, if you want to make your machine sound different, you can go to pinballmix.com, use coupon code BUFFALO to save 10% and get a free Easter egg. So a little special call-out or something like that in your machine. Takes your music, puts it in your machine, does a custom mix just for you. 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Replace those nasty old broken rubbers on your pinball machines with the Titan Pinball competition rings. they come in a bunch of different colors uh they look great they maintain well i just shopped out my tron we'll talk about that a little bit later but i have all titans on my tron and they were they were dirty and all i had to do is wipe them down and they're looking good again so um i think that brings us to the uh conclusion of our sponsors this time thank you for everybody for sponsoring the show and to uh all of you at home for patronizing our good sponsors that was a good read kevin thank you i'm glad you highlighted the beers from community beer works they're crushing it beer wise i probably should order some of those because they they're doing they they were doing delivery i'm guessing they still are so maybe i'll do that thank you balser says flawless so thank you okay well i take it we did it my radio uh my radio history coming out like quit while we're ahead that's right all right that's it see you guys all right let's let's bring doug on and bring him into the mix uh so you know i gave a little bit of an intro to Doug, again, Pinberg, Papa Tournament Director, co-owner of Kickback Pinball Cafe. I mentioned this. Doug was on the show before. Doug came on on the episode a few years ago when we were talking about ending the Buffalo Pinball Open and kind of was there to be a backup in terms of talking about the difficulties of running a tournament and everything. it and you know i doug i've met you maybe in 2011 2012 at the pittsburgh pinball open and one of the nicest people in the pinball hobby like i don't i don't think i've ever seen you play a game of pinball you're always doing stuff for pinball so other people can enjoy the hobby and have fun especially as it relates to tournaments you know you you got a business which is promoting pinball and you know honestly it's it's when i was kind of coming up and really getting into the hobby it's it's people like you when i you're leading by example right like giving back and doing stuff and helping other people in the hobby which has kind of motivated me to uh to do all this so so thank you for that and uh thanks for joining us yeah no problem thanks for having me all right sweet uh sweet long hair it looks like you're ready for the hockey playoffs so yeah i haven't had a haircut since uh last march so just me and kevin briefly before the show went on he went the opposite way that i did yeah i got rid of mine he just let it all go so either way involves not going to a uh to a hairdresser anymore so exactly we're doing it all right well let's jump into things uh when did the big announcement drop was it december that uh it was announced that replay fx and pinberg was was coming to a close it was in november november okay it was about halfway through november seems like a lifetime ago So I knew probably a couple weeks before that that the decision was made, but the official announcement was like mid-November, like November 14th or something, something around that. Okay. All right. So, you know, that was anybody who's been able to attend ReplayFX Pinberg. Pinberg had essentially started in 2011 from the format that we kind of know and love. I know you guys did a Pinberg in the 2000s, but it wasn't necessarily the same. And I've had the distinction. I think there's like 30-some people that have been to all of them since 2011, and I celebrate that fact. It was an incredibly successful thing in terms of interest from pinball players. Like if there's one tournament that they could play in, it was certainly Pinberg. You guys were selling out 1,000 slots for people to play within like a minute or two minutes or something ridiculous. And it's the kind of thing that I never thought would go away. So I'm really curious to kind of give you kind of open forum just to talk about what happened, what the challenges were, how you feel about the whole thing and where you're at with that. So where to start? The the biggest thing that led to the decision to discontinue replay was obviously the pandemic. Right. so not being able to hold a show in 2020 that's that's the main driver of the replay foundation's operating capital is running replay effects uh and as the year began to wear out because initially we talked about pushing the show to like october and then it looked like oh well that's not gonna happen october's not gonna be a good month uh and then we talked about pushing it another year, which we did. And then it started to look like, well, what's the, what does everything look like if we can't run it in 2021? And it basically came down to, if we tried to push ahead and run it in 2021 and had to cancel, we wouldn't have had the finances to refund people. We would have gone out owing people money. But the decision was made to basically cancel when we did, because if we chose to do it at the end of 2020, then after the sale of the assets, everybody would be made whole. We wouldn't leave anybody holding the bag, which I know in the pinball community, there's a lot of sensitivity towards people not getting something when they put money towards it, because it's happened in the past with some companies and pre-orders and stuff like that. And we wanted to avoid that because the Replay Foundation isn't dissolving right now. Some people think that it's dissolving. It's not dissolving. It's still going to carry on some of the things we did before. We're just not going to be running physical events for the foreseeable future. Okay. I guess one of the, when I first heard about that, it's obviously understandable how the pandemic has just really screwed with and messed with everything. And, And, you know, it's kind of an unforeseeable thing. Why not just have canceled it, maybe scale back on some of it? I understand that some people were employed full time by ReplayFX. Maybe lay off some of those people and lay low for a couple of years, but keep the games in storage somewhere. And then when things get back to normal, kind of ramp up somehow or come back. so they're the problem is our biggest expense is the storage of the games um the warehouse space that we lease is six figures a year so to lay low and just absorb rent without any source of income it's just it wasn't something that we could do and a lot of people came forward and were like you should have done a gofundme you should have done this you should have done that we did explore those options internally. The biggest problem there was, once again, we didn't want to leave people holding the bag, so we didn't want to do a GoFundMe, raise a bunch of money. We can't hold the show in 2021, and then we're in the same spot again, except that now we have more of people's money that we're not going to deliver on. Yeah, understandable. And I didn't know. Obviously, I couldn't know how much it is to store that many games, right? You have hundreds of games, and that can't be easy. I know you guys used to have the Papa headquarters, and there was that building. So it probably was easier in some capacities in previous years. But with that headquarters gone, storage becomes more expensive. You guys have always kind of led the pinball community, what you guys are doing in Pinburg, in Pittsburgh, as leaders of, like, running tournaments. There's a lot of talent down there in terms of, like, knowledge, the ability to run, like, a world-class tournament. What's the feeling of the community? Do you, what do you guys see coming out of Pittsburgh? Do you see something coming back in some capacity? What do you think? So almost immediately after we made the announcement, I had a lot of local people reach out to me because Pinburgh is not just a small collection of people running that event. Like literally we tap hundreds of locals. Like our league is huge, but our league doesn't generally have a lot of representation at Pinburgh because they're the ones tournament directing, they're the ones TDing, they're the ones helping in various volunteer positions all throughout the show. There is a great amount of support, and I know that in the Pittsburgh area, there is a group of people looking to further basically what replay was doing, and whether that happens under the replay banner or some other banner, I do believe that major, major, major pinball competition will be returning to Pittsburgh. that's, that's good news. Again, you guys have a lot, it's, it's not just, it's not just the capital to, to do it. It's, it's a skillset, right. To run a large scale event, to understand how to run a good pinball tournament. And you guys have that from, from the year. So it would be a shame to kind of lose that or have that go to waste. One question that I had is I'm drawing a blank. This is why I don't do most interviews. So why don't you tell us, you know, we reached out to you after it happened. We were like, man, we should get Doug on to talk about this because everybody's everybody's bummed out. Everybody wants to know what's happening. And, you know, let's get him in here and kind of, you know, get the get the nitty gritty. And you were just like swamped selling games. And you still are. I see you on Facebook, you know, basically every day there's a new game or two coming up for sale. So what's that experience been like having to offload all of these games that, you know, you spent years and years curating for the for the collection there? Tell us about how that process has been going. It's been it's it's obviously slowed down because in November everything went up for sale and we were just crushed. Like at one point I was like seven days behind on responding to email requests for games. It's been it's been interesting. I've never had to move that many games that quick. At this point, we've sold like 600 games since November. So it's been moving along. Dealing with people is interesting. Like, I've sold games in the past, but obviously only my own stuff. You know, onesies, twosies here and there. Everybody moves games in and out of their collections or whatnot. it's been interesting because it's you know it's funny because I've been doing you know pinball directing and been in the pinball community for probably about 15 years maybe a little bit longer at this point and to have people like email me and tell me I don't know what I'm doing is like okay sure that game's no way it's worth that much okay sure don't buy it I'm the solution to that yeah Yeah, it's just interesting, too, and I always find it funny how people have to weigh in on everything even when they're clearly not interested in it. So what's the biggest group purchase? Like how many machines have gone all at once since you sold? We sold – I'm not going to say who bought it because that's their business. but we sold a lot of like probably like 60 pins altogether to one person and that was a that was a big sale yeah that's huge awesome all right I'm back for at least for one more question so my understanding has been that you know when you're trying to run replay in Pembroke and come up with the cost right you want to make it like the cost is a big issue right you're you guys aren't exactly making a lot of money or really making money on on or we're making money on the event right you're just kind of breaking even if my understanding is correct uh we were at the point where so like we knew and the plan all along was when we started replay like at the beginning you're just not going to make money like it's an investment and you're building for the long term um had the show not been canceled in 2020 we would be getting ready for pinberg 2021 right now replay 2021 right now it's just that that complete loss of income and then not had not being sure if you're going to be able to even recover that in 2021 that basically led to the decision to stop the events okay so my my uh i was talking to you about this before we went live um my buddy joe man spent a weekend don't ask me why figuring out how to how to be able to run a tournament like the size of a replay effects in Pimberg. And his question was, what would the cost be for a player for a 1,000-person tournament to make this kind of a sustainable thing or to build money in the bank for years and years to almost weather a storm like this? I mean, Pimberg, so if you look at just Pimberg, like let's throw replay out the window. Pretend that doesn't exist. if you just have to run the show you're in good shape the problem is all the other costs associated with it like I said the storage of the games because if you're going to run something this big you can't rely on crowdsourcing games because you can't have people bring you games and then you have to worry about you know they show up on Thursday they bring you a game you got to put it somewhere you got to make sure it's set up Replay also employed three full time technicians year round who basically did nothing but work on pinberg and floor games for us so there's a cost associated to that um a lot of our staff while they contribute a lot of volunteer hours they are paid at the show at least the pinberg staff those are all paid positions um so there's that cost there i don't necessarily think that i mean the the result of us no longer continuing to run the tournament isn't because we didn't charge enough if that's what the question is um i don't have a dollar figure for what it costs because i don't know a lot of the behind the scenes uh cost of things i just don't deal with the financial stuff but there's there's a whole lot that goes into prepping and running the tournament in terms of like things you would spend money on that you wouldn't even consider that as a cost. Like just looking at it from the outside, okay, so you got to rent the hall, you got to put the games in place, and you go, right? Well, to get to that point, you know, replay in Pinburgh specifically is a year-round thing. Like when the show would end, we get everything brought back to the facility. Most of us would take one or two weeks off, and then you're right back at it. You know, we're creating the banks for next year. They're already getting moved in position. The techs were already working on the issues we had during the show. You know, I'm having meetings with Eitan and Bowen on what we're going to do different, how to get, you know, how to get a project plan in order to make any enhancements we want to make for the following year. So like, there's, there's a lot of planning. I don't want to, I don't want to discourage anybody from trying to run something like this. Because also remember that Pemberg started as a small tournament. it wasn't a thousand people from day one. Um, it was, I think our first one was a hundred people. In 2011 it was like 173 or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. So like it was a lot more manageable back then and we've learned a lot through the years of running it on how to kind of streamline the process. Um, it's been fun and I don't think we've seen the end of large match play tournaments in Pittsburgh, but for now we have. so so i have another question here um so well just to piggyback on that you you guys used to run so like to prepare that it's not even just the maintenance of the games you would uh have these tournaments leading up to pinberg so you could time out how long each bank would play to keep everything moving on schedule so it's like there's so much planning in uh the overall logistics of this tournament talk to us a little bit about that for the people who might not understand Yeah, once we decide how the banks are going to be set up, we then start doing playtesting sessions. And those generally ran from February through about two weeks before the show, so February to late July. And what those were is we would basically have all the games broken up into banks, and we would have people come in and basically play a small strikes tournament, four-player games, so that we could keep the times that the individual games were running on and kind of put all that information together and get an idea of how long a bank's going to take because timing is important in Pinburgh. If you go over on rounds, then it's just not a good thing. So we would do a lot of play testing, and we would run two sessions a week for five months. So there's a lot of time invested in that. And, of course, as they're playing stuff, they're breaking it, so they've got to fix it again. Yeah, that was something we started, I think, when we went to 400 people, because before that it was just basically the people that worked there would play the games. The timing wasn't as tight back then, because if you remember, we used to only have one group per four games, and now we were at the point where we were running three groups per four games. So, like, before it didn't matter if you really had one long-playing game, as long as the other three were quick everybody would still get through it but now when you have one long playing game you could be backing up everything the other three groups that are waiting on that game so yeah the play testing was a was a big part of it and a huge time suck i can imagine yeah it's it's really mind-boggling when you think about all the all all the the big picture stuff you have to think about it's not just like do the games work and do we have flares there's there's a lot beyond that i miss just having to worry about do the games work you got a i think a pretty good question in chat from pinball profile would have been easier or harder to run more than one a year easier financially harder for people to run that's the question uh so we had thought i mean we discussed a bunch of things um you know in the past to try and get more people into the tournament number one uh running more than one a year would be very, very, very difficult. Because even like, I was basically in charge of everything that happened with Pembroke. I wasn't a full-time employee for the Replay Foundation. And I volunteered a lot of hours to get things done as it was. Doing more than one a year, you're also asking a lot of your volunteer pool to, you know, because a lot of us, like me included with my regular job, I take two weeks of vacation for replay every year is what I would do. So at that point, you're asking me to burn all my vacation to go run a pinball tournament um i i'm not sure it would be feasible from the manpower standpoint like i think the demand would be there and i think we would sell it out i don't think that would be a problem i think your difficulty would come with can we staff it so did you have plans to expand beyond a thousand was there a roadmap ahead like by Yeah, so I three we want to get to 1500 or something like that. Yeah, I have I keep internally for myself a three year roadmap for Pinberg. We had discussed some possibilities to increase the number of players. There were a couple various scenarios. So at some point you run into the issue of games, number one. And we were kind of maxed out as far as that went. but there are other ways to structure things to get more people in there. It's just how much you want to change the core of the tournament. Like one of the ideas that was thrown out, we never implemented was to do like a, for the qualifying days, a group A and a group B basically increase the tournament by two days. And you would have group A qualify on day one, group B qualify on two, then split them into their divisions for two more days and then have the finals on the fifth day. with that you can theoretically double the number of people you could have in the tournament but it's a it'd be a little bit of a different experience because you you would only play every other day as opposed to playing every day so we decided not to go against that to go with that because uh we didn't think the experience would be good for the players because a lot of people want to come and they want to compete for those four days five days uh and having every other day off, we weren't sure that people would appreciate that because they'd have to extend the time that they're in Pittsburgh, which is, you know, cost that they're away from their job and that's cost for a hotel room or whatever. And we never went with that one. Yeah. It's interesting to hear the other possible scenarios that could have been right. So thanks for sharing that. So we're on a, we're on limited time with Doug. So we want to shift gears unless Kevin, and you have any other questions. Talk a little bit about the Kickback Pinball Cafe. So, Doug, for those who don't know, what is Kickback Pinball Cafe? So it is a coffee shop slash pinball arcade located on Butler Street in Pittsburgh, in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. Me and my co took it over a few years ago The owner that that was running it um basically had to step down but she sold us the business and uh it everything was going great Uh, obviously pandemics, arcades and stuff are hurting. We've had to close for a lot of 2020. We weren't allowed to have people in our building. Um, we're back to being open, um, responsibly open following all the rules and we're committed to another year in our current space. And we're going to see how it goes once, uh, hopefully people, people are allowed to come out and, you know, feel safe of coming out and playing again. Well, I'd like to make, um, one of my, my first stops when get vaccinated and things get back to normal coming down to show you guys some love because I'm, uh, uh, Pittsburgh is only three and a half hours away from us. And, uh, We love you guys down there. It's such a great group of people. Kickback Pinball Cafe is such a great place. I love the art on the floor and everything. You guys get it. You're pinball people. It's such a cool space. It's a really unique space. Actually, one of the things that one of our local players posted on our local Facebook wall, which if you haven't done that and you have the means to, when the refunds were going out for replay, One of the suggestions they made was find whatever your local pinball hangout is and take your take your pinberg money. If you have the ability to, you know, if it's if it's extra money for you and go buy a gift card to whatever your local location is. So if people haven't done that and, you know, they want to think about what can I do with this extra hundred fifty dollars? Try and keep your local arcades going, because a lot of them have been shut down. And I know there's been quite a few big names that have fallen, you know, in the past year. You just see all these announcements going up and it's and it's sad because I think it'll take a while for the for the communities in those areas to recover. You know, not every not every city is like Portland. There's you know, I'm pretty sure in Portland they just, you know, have pinball machines sitting on the street that you trip over as you walk around. And it takes a lot of work and a lot of dedication to keep a good location that services pinball players working. And I know there's a lot of places out there that focus on pinball and they put the right amount of maintenance in it and they put the right amount of attention so that their players have a good experience. And if you have the means to support them, you know, even if they're not open or even if you don't want to go out and play, if you can buy a gift card, if you can do anything. I can't encourage people. I mean, I can't really think of anything in the pinball community that would be more impactful right now. You guys used to do the, I mentioned earlier, the Pittsburgh Pinball Open. Is that something that we'll see in the future? Yeah, that'll definitely be back. We got canceled, obviously, in 2020. Tentatively, we're not scheduling anything until 2022, because at this point, I'm not sure that even scheduling events in the fall, you're going to get the required turnout to make any expenses worthwhile. So right now it's tentatively scheduled for 2022. Awesome. I know you guys used to have what you would call the clubhouse, right? You used to have that, and you had that inspirational writing on the wall because you used to be a gym. But you guys closed that, right? Do you have another space? That's like a kind of clubhouse co-op thing going on or no? So we called it the Pittsburgh Pinball Factory because it was in an industrial area, Pittsburgh. And that building got bought by a developer to build really expensive condos. So we were forced to leave there. Now there's, as far as locations in Pittsburgh, you've got Kickback on. You've got the Pittsburgh Pinball Dojo, which is in Bellevue, which is kind of an extension of that, of what the clubhouse was. That's John Rapogle and Jake Olijacek and a couple other locals there. And that's basically a place to develop pinball players and basically caters to the pinball crowd. They've been closed this whole time, too. There's another location called Coop DeVille that's in the Strip District, which is new. And there's another location called Helicon. A nd those are pretty much the main places for pinball in the city. All right. Great. And then I think last question, unless Kevin has some. I actually have two more questions, but I'm going to ask one that we have in our notes. What's next for the Replay Foundation? So, as mentioned, we're not going to continue to run events for the foreseeable future. Bowen recently put out a video a tutorial so the tutorials are going to continue he's found a source to locally film them where he lives which is more cost efficient anyway honestly we're going to continue to do the things that we've done in the past so for example like Josh Sharp emailed me the other day about a rules change so we're still going to weigh in on that kind of stuff But Pear Networks slash Replay still funds like the IPDB's hosting. That's all done basically through us. So they pay for that. And if anybody uses Joe Schober's tournament software, I believe that's also hosted through Pear. Awesome. I've got one more question for Doug and then Kevin. I'll see if you have any questions. Just a softball question for you at the end. what has been your favorite pinball machine that's come out in the last year or two? Last year or two? I am a big Avengers fan right now. I'm not sure if it's better than Jurassic Park. Not sure, but that's been the one that I've gravitated to the most recently when I've been down a kickback. Thank you. All right, no further questions from me. You're off the hook. Kev, you got anything? We got one from our friend Goran of Topper Talk fame. He asks, if you had the opportunity to organize a Pinburger-like event again from scratch, what about the overall format would you change? I think the format's pretty good. I mean, and I think that's kind of been borne out through the fact that we can sell out a thousand-person tournament in 30 seconds. There isn't much I would – actually, there probably isn't anything I would change about the format. The format is unique in not just its size, but the way it's played out. I know other people run smaller Pinberg version tournaments. It's, I don't know. We get suggestions every once in a while to change a little thing here or there. Restrictions are always a big, big thing people want changed. But as far as just the way the tournament runs and the general format, I probably really wouldn't change anything about it. I think many of us would echo that sentiment as well because we loved it. Yeah, like for me, it was kind of hard to argue when it sells out that quick that like, oh, well, this is a broken system. Exactly. Obviously, people don't want to do this. But yeah, when this announcement came out, it was like the one thing that was like, for me personally, it's like, oh, man, things are not going to be the same once we get out of this. that thing that we all love doing every summer. If it comes back, it'll be different. It's definitely not going to be the way it was. I speak for all the past Pinberg players when we thank you for everything you and the team did down there. It was a great experience for all of us. We loved it. We appreciate anybody that's ever come out to one of our events. I always tell people my favorite, my highlight of my summer was always standing on that stage at the beginning of round one when we had everybody in the audience for the announcements and just look out on a on the sea of people that's standing out there and be like wow this is this is a pinball tournament like like it was just i don't know it just had a different vibe than everything else and uh i i hope that you know and i think it will i think competitive pinball will continue to grow um i think we're going to see bigger and bigger events it's just a matter of, you know, the people having the ability to run them because it's not easy and having the financial backing to run it because it can be expensive. Doug, man, listen, man, you, you, you and your team gave me a lot of good memories in pinball that I'll never forget. And I've made a lot of friendships in the pinball world because of Inberg and the pop of tournaments that went on. So, so I can't thank you enough. and we're all grateful for the long run that you guys had. It's absolutely amazing what you were able to pull off. It was an honor and pleasure having people come to our events. All right. Well, we're going to let Doug go. So thanks again for joining us. Thanks for talking about that. I know it's a bittersweet thing. Thanks for having me on, guys. I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Good talking to you, Doug. All right. uh with that why don't we uh we can head right over into some uh some pinball news so let's let's yeah i'm gonna do a quick call to action so um we don't do this a lot but uh if you're not a subscriber to our twitch channel consider doing that you can subscribe through uh twitch or amazon prime right for free each month you gotta do automatically each month or if you want don't want to do it that way uh you can become a subscriber for five dollars a month support the good work that kevin and i do as as we hustle through the pandemic to bring you quality content There you go, Kevin. I'm always doing the selling. You do the sponsors. I'll do the PBS call to action. And I got the link in chat, so we're doing it all together. Look at that. God, it's like we've been doing this podcast for five years or something. Excellent. All right. Are we ready for pinball news? Actually, it's our five-year anniversary in February, right? Of the podcast? I think so. Yeah. I think February 2016 is when we set up a snowball mic that we shared and had a junky video. And I have to go back and listen to how terrible that is. It was bad. I think it had an echo and shit. It was echo. Yeah, because we tried to do two USB mics, and it wasn't working. And we had this, like, plastic patio table that we were sitting at. And it's really – we've come a long way. It's really stepping it up here. I like RMS. There's pinball news. So we do a once-a-month podcast, you know? And we're like, Jesus, what are we going to talk about? You're going to see. News is in quotes this month. So let's get to it. Let's have Tim bring in the news for us. Here's to Tim. all right so uh let's start off um you know pinball profile in chat mentioned day fix so why don't we kick it off with some american pinball news uh and we'll let me uh find my thing here nope not that one this one and we'll go over here and where is it oh this is this is the this is what you sub for kids this is it smooth and seamless all right so we'll go over here to pinball news and there's two two new hire announcements from uh american pinball the first is zofia ryan um she is a mechanical engineer she's going to be their senior mechanical mechanical engineer and you may know her from a number of games that she worked on with Barry Oursler from the 90s dr who she did the amazing um three level mini uh time expander mini playfield excuse me uh she also did the legendary missed multiball on bram stoker's dracula and She did some stuff on Popeye Saves the Earth and Dirty Harry as well. But I feel like the Time Expander and the Miss Multiball are two amazing mechs, toys if you want to call them, in the history of pinball. So that's a good hire for American Pinball. They're bringing on some solid additions to the team over there, as well as, I should mention if I didn't, this is from pinballnews.com, uh jack hager has joined american pinball as well he's joining them as the um as their art director so you may know him from art packages like uh star wars and uh stern star wars and um full throttle i think were his two most recent games that he worked on so um there's some concept art that he developed so he did a lot of stuff with williams and bally back in the day he also did a number of uh arcade video games like narc and um i think revolution x uh island art concept look at that i like i'd love that game so you get it to go next to your pirates i don't know why uh companies like you know just don't go to fiverr like uh punny factory did don't worry we're gonna get the funny factory don't don't don't thank god thank god don't jump the gun nick uh so yeah um So two good hires from American Pinball. I think they're really stepping up their game. I think Dave Fix, they got him on board, and they went all out with hiring. Yeah, he's crushing it. Oops, I've got to switch over to my other doc here. Cool. Up next, are you ready for a Deep Root update? Oh, my God. Deep Root and Puny Factory? This is what the show has just evolved into when there's nothing to talk about. Well, they keep giving us stuff to talk about. God bless them. Okay, let's do this. We're going to go over this. This is my ignorance is bliss. Like, I don't pay attention to any of this stuff. We're going to jump over. That's why it's great to bring this to your attention live on the podcast. All right. Let's go. So, deeper pinball update. This is from this week in pinball. February 8th this came out. It's long. This will not be the unabridged version of this. We're going to pick and choose. I'm guessing the TLDR, too long, didn't read, is that they still are making excuses for not shipping games, right? Yes. Yes, you nailed it. Okay. It's always better. We could probably go back to a podcast from three years ago when we were laughing about the same shit. It's always more interesting to hear it in our own words, I think. I like that, yeah. Let's kick it off. Dear Raza customer, first, thank you for your business and decision to buy into an amazing machine we spent years designing to bring out the best of Popidoo's original theme and layout. As I am writing this email, I'm aware of the weight of accountability and filling orders of quality machines as soon as possible. I'm providing the below as a matter of goodwill and transparency, knowing that it will be unfortunately posted online or misreported by podcasts. Plural, hey, that's us. Misreported? Misreported. How do you misreport something? What is there we misreport? Like you didn't ship a game? How do we mess that up? It's going to be twisted in ways where truth, civility, and rationality go to die. I mean, we don't want to let anybody down. We're coming out saying that pinball is easy. Yeah, we're the jerks. Okay. All right, order. So if you didn't remember, they had this open for a limited time window of ordering. So you can't order a Raza anymore. You also can't get a Raza anymore. Orders paid or goodwill for 70 arcade editions and 60 extra editions of Raza. Raza is Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, for those of you following along at home. we will round up to 160 total raza games with most of the remaining games available for sale at eight thousand dollars us dollars uh eight thousand us dollars excuse me starting price for the arcade edition and 13 000 us dollars for flat fee for the extra edition more details on the timing of that later after all raza games have sold we will publish the exact game count so um So the differentiation there is like new orders versus the goodwill ones are the games that they were owed from the previous iteration of John Papadiuk's company, Zidware. So they're promising to fulfill those orders, which is a good thing to do. I like that. But these totals include those orders that were already in. These aren't just new sales of the game. So we're going to skip past UL licensing. Nobody cares about that. Parts. Parts is good. You're going to like this. With most vendors going dark for the last two weeks of December and the first week of January, we have orders in for about 70% of the bill of materials. There are three main hiccups. One, long lead times in general and vendors promising one thing before they get their money. Then, van, typo, Then quickly changing their tune after getting their money is the most prevalent reason for the delayed orders and parts. They interpret that. It's everybody else's fault. Yeah. Not theirs. They certainly didn't take anybody's money and are not delivering their money. They didn't do anything wrong. No, exactly. It's everybody else's fault. Yeah. They're victims. There have been some great vendors who are exceeding expectations, and we sincerely appreciate their efforts. The lock bar we designed is more ergonomically usable, so the one that does not jab your hands and give you the stigmata. um ball stigmata is more economically usable is complex with two stamps and several welded reinforcements the complexity of the design has caused a large number of vendors to pass on it with the cost and time frame we needed it we finally have two vendors that are willing to do small runs the problem is getting them into their already full production schedule to arrive ASAP okay let me before we go to the next bullet point you ready to break that down because they fucking decided to redesign the lockdown bar, which nobody asked for. This is like, not one person is like, can you please redesign the lock bar? This is another excuse why they can't ship their game. Okay, great. Good move. It's innovation. Pin bar. Oh man, I lost my website. Take it back to the website. Let's keep on misconstruing all this stuff, Kevin. Yeah, exactly. It's where all this goes to die. When they fold, they're going to blame anybody who's criticized them. It's going to be podcasters, and it's going to be the weather this month. Podcasters and the vendors. Because pinball is easy. Everybody else just fucked it up. Wildcat says we have to go back to UL licensing. All right. Let's finish on parts. The lighted side panels prototypes we have for our two extra editions had some wear and tear issues with frayed wires and sizing. It has taken the last 60-plus days working with several vendors to redesign them to be more durable and allow for spacing for leg protectors or cup holders, et cetera. So their lit side panels were failing. So two points for at least communicating what's going on. I think that's generally, you know, we'll dissect it. I mean, it's going to happen because you put it out there. Like, that's how life works, you know. Yep. But at least they're communicating. Okay, let's go to the part that Wildcat wants us to read. You must have missed something here. All right. uh ulce we were not able to get our machines scheduled to go into the labs for ul testing or international slash ce testing until two weeks ago so this was in january then uh so far i understand that most tests have been passed i understand they can take up to five weeks to complete testing and receiving reports and certification we will not be able to release ship any games until those are complete so another three weeks or so maybe until they can They even get testing done, but then they still only have 70% of their bill of materials on order. And they're making like 20 games, right? But this is the only game we've ever seen or talked about? Correct. And still not shipping? Yes. Okay, all right. Just want to get this for the record. I don't want to misconstrue anything. Production. We have the first lines ready to go, and we'll proceed in prepping what we can while waiting on parts and certification. There are tiered production stations. the ones that can produce deliverables will start in the next few weeks I made the decision not to show production lines or illusory and deceptive pictures of parts or lines or cabinets for many reasons the only thing that matters is you getting your brand new Raza on your doorstep in working condition as soon as possible that is a picture that will actually mean something we fully look forward to seeing your media seeing your delivery pics and unboxing videos post it or tag to one or more of our social media pages hashtag like follow and subscribe uh additional streams people want to see more streams and they're not going to do it um right now expectations disappointing news may have a bright side we what's that they said about they have a thing about streaming which caught my eye yeah uh they got oh yeah they're gonna do internal streaming yeah they're gonna do this streaming themselves because they're so good at doing everything so they're going to continue to go on this path of doing themselves they finally got all the cameras for their internal rig you know how long it is to hit the amazon button to get streaming cameras kevin it takes like one two days sometimes it's tough i mean it might be a little delayed now with the pandemic it may take a full week or so to get your it might take yeah it might take a full week might take a full whole week so i got it we're good yep um uh we expect to have parts through the through the first week of march at this point with the first razas leaving mid-march so they're saying here that the first games are going to be out the door in mid-March. And here we are, February 27th. So we'll see. Let's hold them accountable to that, everybody. The certifications for ULCE should also be done around that time. While that may sound disappointing to wait another couple of weeks for games, there is a bright side. Since the run of Raza Machines is limited, we should be done much quicker than our anticipated and originally announced time of three and a half to four months. We have had some of you contact us about jumping the line. It doesn't make any sense at this point. you and other customers will be playing Raza sooner than you think. Next communication plans to update customers again by the end of February. They got until tomorrow. Thank you again for your trust in business. Thank you for your patience. We look forward to exceeding expectations, and we are grateful for you allowing us a chance to do so. If you have any questions, contact them at whatever this email address is. Contact at DeepRoot Pinball if you want to contact them or by visiting the website, Robert J. Mueller Esquire. No, he's not an Esquire. But, yeah, so there's your Deep Root update. Stay tuned for the next coming before the end of the month. Yeah. Fantastic. All right. Let's see. What's next? We got Plenty Factory. Not to be outdone by Deep Root. It's a Plenty Factory. They're going to release a game, though. they're going to have a playable game that people could buy before deep root so anybody who shifts a pit while working pinball machine like you enter into a category that's way ahead of deep root like this is the best part like like if fucking punny factory gets in people's hands before rosa or any game from deep root it's just it's just the cherry on the top man i love it steve wants you to define playable yeah all right can we can we just take a quick little did you watch this video so they're doing i watched me the first two yeah they did they're doing a 10 part series this is fucking insane sorry i gotta i gotta show the beginning all right let's let's okay so pinball adventures i'll read a line for the people at home join us on our adventure to making the most epic pinball games ever the most epic ready for the most epic pinball games ever there might be might be an overreach here it's a little hyperbole yeah they're they're a little They're aiming high, which I guess I can appreciate. Yeah, I can appreciate that. So this first one's about the idea, concept, and rules. Because everybody wanted to learn more about this. Yes. There's lots of, like, 50s TV cuts, and there's, like, they have Don Knotts in the game, apparently, but it's not really. Where's Don Knotts? Fucking up. That's a good voice actor, I guess, for Don Knotts, but then again, I'm not 80 years old, so I wouldn't know. Exactly. All right, here we go. Here's Don Knotts. Let me turn him up so you guys can hear him at home a little bit. Hi, folks. Don Knotts here. That was the character that the Punny Factory pinball machine was built around. Well, to be honest, I'm not the real Don Knotts. Just another lovable version. But, doggone it, I'm ready to be your guide and show you how the Punny Factory pinball machine was made. All right. So, do you think they got the Don Knotts, permission to use Don Knotts in the game here? Even if they're saying it's not the right one? That's a question I even start with. Like, this is a 10-part series. I saw maybe, like, two that were released, and I'm just... This is an 8-minute video, this one. It's just, like, the self-love with this concept and this game, like, just doubling, tripling down. Like, it's just weird. like it's just uh it's really fascinating to me i i don't know yeah i do you want to go over the rules the rules are pretty intense i don't know if you can handle it all right here we go through all rollovers that would work with the occasional and experienced player using the name potty factory andrew thought it would be a neat idea to have the player spell out the factory name letters and then enter into a press in the middle of the play field to press the puns back together. Wow, you hit the stand-up targets on the sides of the play field to spell Puny Factory or whatever it was, and then you hit the scoop to release a pun. That's really next-level stuff. I think what this guy has is called fuck-you money. You can just make this esoteric pinball machine that nobody asked for and then do a ten-part self-indulgent series on it. Like, if he came out and was like, dude, I'm just trolling everybody, I'd be like, you fucking did it. You did it. But he's not. He's not. This is real. Yeah, you and Chris the Pinserter are on the same page. He says, rich people throwing money in the garbage. We'll go back to this a little bit more. And then you can enjoy the rest of the show. He's in the pos of the factory. We're blown apart in the explosion and now need to be repressed. Now, to many, this may seem like a simple set of rules. However, when you need to get 50 puns back together, and you have pop-up targets that show up or however to block your ball, it's not that simple anymore. You have to do this 50 times. And several other nifty things to the game, including multi-balls. Multi-balls? Animation, great sound effects. Animation and sound effects. And music. And with all that, sir, you have won. Is that an LED version? Excuse my language. F*** the game. Wow. it's like the eighth time they show a picture of Don Knotts 150 puns would never have the same game twice I can't that's enough that's the law firm that represents Don Knotts and his estate let's fucking send this to them Jesus Christ just spell 50 times it'll be fine here's the deal like if you want to have somebody sound like Don Knotts I'm sure that's okay but you don't say Don Knotts and you don't show his picture over and over again I think that's like, I'm not an attorney, but I'm guessing that's okay. Yeah. I had to guess. It like they looked at International Rescue on Thunderbirds and were like that great How can we really take that to the next level The consultant on this game was the guy who made Thunderbirds. So there you go. There's, uh, at least three or four of those videos out there all, all together. So, uh, it's currently rocking 18 thumbs up and 13 thumbs down. So not, not looking great for pinball. I would give it a thumbs up because I want to see more. I just want to encourage this guy to just keep on throwing money in the garbage. It's not a terribly produced video. No. That's the crazy thing. There's time and money and investment that went into this thing. Yeah, they did some storyboarding for this, for sure. They planned it out. They had their little smoke machine go off. The factory's exploding. Speaking of time, we're going to get to Topper Talk later, but this is supposed to have a smokestack topper, so maybe that'll be the best part of the game. Okay. Can't wait for that. There you go. That's your Puny Factory update. Let's get into Multimorphic. I got my P3 behind me over here with Cosmic Kart Racing in there, the play field in there, for two reasons. One, there's a new Ranger in the Ruins update, which came out. I streamed it. We found a bunch of bugs, and then they fixed it. So there's another update that I'm going to get in there. But the big addition is that there's a new wizard mode in there, which I'm going to have to try to get to. So that'll be cool. I've also gone through and I started documenting what all the different items do. pretty pretty cool little game for the for the cosmic kart racing play field uh another update is that um jerry from multimorphic posted in the p3 owners thread on on pinside and there's some pretty cool stuff in here he says for heist um their most recent release he says we're working on a major update that will include this wizard mode um which is pretty much an entire second game because this wasn't in the original release we made it fairly difficult to collect all the characters so on the current version of the software it's harder to collect the characters when the new release is out we'll make it easier to qualify and break characters out of jail we're not publicly guessing when the release will be out but we have a team of people working on it it will easily be the deepest and most thematically integrated wizard mode ever in pinball so big words from jerry there but uh i'm excited to see what he's what he's bringing to it uh the fact that he calls it pretty much an entire second game is cool and uh i like the idea of uh the characters being the middle ground and then something bigger being even after that. Looking forward to what's coming from Heist, because I really like that game, and the fact that they got more coming for it is a big win in my book. I saw a comment in the chat about Puny Factory. Donnie in chat writes they probably know as much about using likenesses and rights laws as they do about pinball. I think that sums it up, man. You nailed it. Good job, Donnie. All right, so that's it for the Multimorphic update. Spooky has a minor update from what I was able to scoop over the past month via just another pinball podcast. He did an interview with Scott Denisey. We talked a little bit about the fact that Total Nuclear Annihilation is going to get rerun. He was calling it TNA 2.0. I don't know if that's an official name or just the code name for the new rerun. But along with it is going to be a new code update for everybody. So it's not just going to be for the new games. It's going to be for all the backwards compatible games. So Scott has been doing a great job keeping that game updated. It's a passion project of his, and he does a great job, and it's a super fun game. So looking forward to seeing what's coming with a new version of TNA. With JJP, their big news this month was that they announced a $1,000 price increase on Guns N' Roses. Thankfully not if you already had your order in. It's only on new orders going forward, but it's on all models of Guns N' Roses. I think we jinxed it last month by talking about CERN updating their prices on Batman and Elvira by $500. And JJP was like, hold my beer, we're going to go $1,000. I mean, nobody likes a price increase, but what are you going to do? And we don't know why, because they didn't say why. When Stern did a price increase They said it was parts or something like that They did a very brief update on their website It was a super Quick news release Explaining demand and parts and stuff like that I assume And the tariffs on parts coming in I think that was part of it So we can speculate that it's something along those lines For JJP as well We also know that demand is off the charts For GNR So the demand's there You know, what are you going to do? Nobody likes it, but, I mean, it's good for them. I'm stoked that they have a hit on their hands, and hopefully they can turn this into a more sustainable future for the company, for sure. And on the code update front, there's two pending code updates on the way. as a Jersey Jack pinball insider in the beta test group. I'm currently running a new version of Willy Wonka that brings Scorbit and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth integration. It'll bring it to an official release. And there's an update in Guns N' Roses coming that there's a number of bug fixes and things like that. But the big rule change is there's a big scoring opportunity on the left bass ramp. So climbing all the way up to the duff bass ramp, there's some added incentive to go for that. There's a couple of bugs in there. There's something right now where it doesn't give you the opportunity to cash out the songs in a certain situation. I haven't played it a ton yet, but I've been reading about that in the beta chat. But they're working on that. So hopefully we'll see something next week as far as an official release. but good stuff rolling out there. I got a question for you. Speaking of GDP code updates. So I had asked about when like the code updates coming for pirates, right? And you said there was an answer in telegram. I forgot to look. Okay. So, you know, the answer is, are you able to publicly say what, what, what was the response? I think Keith weighed in on that so long ago. And so buried in the chat that I don't remember what it said, but yeah, I, I would have had to look that up before the show. I won't be able to find it right now. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. I thought you might know off the top of your head. I just want to know if it's coming, like if it's still, like he gave the affirmative that it's on track or something. Yeah, I think it was that it's still coming, but who knows. Okay. All right. We'll get that for you next month. How about that? All right. That is the end of the avalanche of film all-news for the month. I know it was. Jesus Christ. We talk more about, like, Puny Factory and deeper than that. That's all there is to talk about. Well, at least it's entertaining. All right. We can get to our game room updates. I've got a few. So since we were talking about P3, I got more P3 action on the way. I did order a Lexi Lightspeed. So I got that play field coming. So it'll be fun. I'll be able to stream that for you guys and add some more value to my P3. So I will have three playfields altogether, Cosmic Kart Racing, Heist, and Lexi once that gets here. Oh, and if you're keeping track at home about how the weather may have influenced the production of games coming out of Texas, such as Deep Root or Multimorphic, I ordered the Lexi play field on, I think, Wednesday, and it shipped out on Thursday. So they're able to keep things running over at Multimorphic. That's all I'm saying. Depending on the next Deep Root update, we'll see how things go. I gave Tron a bath yesterday for a couple reasons. The spinning disc in the back, the rubber disc had started coming off, so I pulled that out, put a new one on there. So I got a brand new clear disc on there, which makes the ball do crazy things. And while I had it apart, I gave it a bath, cleaned it off, I waxed it, I treated it to some new balls. so I'm going to stream that on Monday so it should be pretty fun it plays pretty fast when you get that new disc in there and wax it so tune in for that it will probably not be a see a simulation or a portal night but we'll see we'll probably get to see a simulation but I don't know if we'll get to portal with it playing as fast as it does so tune in and find out I did a so if you're looking behind me over here down there there's a star wars in my game room which y'all know i'm not a fan of but uh for christmas i got a star wars pinball art puzzle and uh i put that together as a pandemic uh task and i framed it but on the wall so stern i partnered with a local uh company called buffalo games uh no relation oh no kidding yeah uh i didn't realize it was buffalo games that they that's cool yeah and so this came out last year and i was like that's cool that'd be fun to do you know something to do to kill some time while we're all sitting around at home so uh i did that and since i spent the time to do it let's let's throw it in the game room uh since then cern has announced a couple more puzzles i don't know if you saw that but they're doing they're doing a there's a um zombie yeti puzzle and there's one with this like feudal japanese thing they had kind of um teased everybody with, like, this is our next game release. You know, it was a pile of puzzle pieces. People were trying to figure out what theme it was, but it was, no, it was actually a puzzle that they came out with. So if you want pinball puzzles, Stern's got you covered. And it was fun. Oh, and last but not, certainly not least, when you're talking to Nick Lane. Nick, I played a VR game this month. I heard Gorn's got, like, you on alerts. he's like kevin's playing vr he came in and lost his mind i was like gordon i had vr before before you and nick like it's true like i have vr i just don't play very often i got that uh that um darth vader hipster i don't know if you played that one darth vader immortal or something like that yeah pretty fun i played the first episode i got two more to go but it's like all right play a little play a little vader if you give me some lightsabers like like beat saber was cool and give me that except the actual Star Wars universe. Now we're talking. Maybe it's because I played that puzzle. I feel like Star Wars now. El Rocco said, get everybody hyped just to disappoint them. Good marketing. Talk about the puzzles. Oh, yeah. Stern's good. They get you hyped. A fucking puzzle? Yeah. That was basically the reaction. I think it was yesterday they announced that. In the 1920s, they think people were going to get hyped for puzzles. Listen, no disrespect to the puzzles, but come on. When you're teasing a pinball machine, then you deliver a puzzle. how do you think that's going to go? Rucko, it's a thousand piece puzzle. I don't know if they pointed that out in the announcement enough, but thousand pieces. All right. What's your game room updates, Nick? So I am babysitting a Black Knight Sword of Rage Pro. There was a location that's closing down, and we had to get our games out there. Not that they were being operated, but we just had them there kind of in storage, quote, unquote. and instead of going into storage container or trailer or something or somebody's garage I was like I'll take it actually Kevin I messaged you I was like Kevin do you want Black Knight Sword of Rage and you're like maybe so we just don't have it sitting out in the cold and I told Martha about that she's like why don't you say we'll take it I was like we have no place for games oh we'll put it in the dining room alright what is going on in the world I never thought these things would happen like but sure yeah i we can put it in the dining room i'm totally cool with that so um you know it's a game i've obviously played before we had on location but it's nice to play something new because i've not played any pinball games other than my immediate collection in the last year uh so that that was nice um psychologically i think and then uh uh because it is a stern game in the era of the last three years where they've had the pooling and cracking problem of course this had some pooling on it and um i did a video which is up on youtube about ironing uh of the pooling out of it uh this is a fix that comes from yellowbird and yellowbird from pin side is actually um from the mod couple pinball so if you if you found that helpful think yellowbird that's his idea it's not mine i don't know fix shit um you support him with mod couple pinball to thank him by some mods but it was I wanted to document doing this that was like kind of like not live but I hadn't done it before so we documented the process and we put it up there so hopefully that's helpful to a lot of people it worked surprisingly quite well much better like the bubble that I was working on is much better than it was there's still it's a little raised a little bit but I'm hoping by putting a washer there and a piece of clear vinyl over it and ironing it down, it helps. Some other people were nice and reached out to me because I posted about that issue on Pinside. And people who have done this fix have said it's been holding up. So it's the type of thing where the bubble that I fixed was definitely a bubble that would have cracked in a matter of time because it's the same kind of bubbling that happened on a metal rail guide as it happened on my Deadpool. I saw other people with Black Knight that had the cracking. So it's like I might as well try it because I have nothing to lose because I'm just going to be in the same spot anyways. There's some other pooling on the game that's not as bad that I'm not going to kind of mess around with until it gets to the point I'll monitor it. But it's nice to have this fix. I don't know how permanent it is. It sucks. I don't want to be ironing a play field. You know, there's a cost. The iron's like $20, and you can see what you need to order if you go to that video. Then you probably want to get some Mylar. There's circles from Pinmonkey you can buy. and whatever. There's just the cost associated and also the psychological frustration of having to iron your play field or worry about it. It's funny because, you know, I look at these stern playfields, you know, they started doing the clear coating themselves and like the clear is really thick on it. Like it looks really nice. I think the problem is it could be too thick or it's not setting right. But, you know, I think in trying to do better clear, they introduce another problem, which is a really bad problem, right? The best play field I have from Stern is Walking Dead. I don't think they were doing it in-house at the time. This is 2015. That play field is not a thick clear, but you know how sometimes, Kevin, if you see where the ball goes and the ball return in the drain, like a lot of times the wood's chipping there. I don't know if they've ever looked at it. Like on Iron Man, it gets chipped or whittled down. It's not like you see it. It's not a big deal. It's not on that game at all. That game is just like perfect in terms of holding up. So I don't know, man. It's a bummer. The problem still exists. I had, you know, I'm trying to, I was asking that thread on Pinside if this issue is going on with Led Zeppelin. I don't think I have heard anything about it yet. It's the type of thing, too, with the pooling and the cracking where you can get a game, and it's not going to show up immediately. It's the kind of stuff that could take months to show up. Like, the game that I have was made in April 2019, The Black Knight, the one I'm babysitting. And it has a little over 1,000 plays on it, and it hasn't cracked yet, but it's pooling. So I'm sure when we took it out of the box, it probably looked beautiful. And it just starts developing over time. So they're kind of like a ticking time bomb. And it seems like this problem is just on like almost all the games, if not all of them. Somebody else messaged me locally trying to help me out. And he said that Gorilla Biscuits on Pinside said that he did this fix and he did that like on eight Stern games or something like that. Like on all the games he's bought. So I talked to James in Rochester. He's had that problem. So it just seems like it's everywhere. So, again, hopefully this gives some people some help and solace. It's something that we shouldn't have to do at all. I hope that people don't think that it's okay to keep on producing playfields like this because now we have a fix. As I say in the video, this is not a Stern-approved fix. So, you know, do this at your own risk. I'm sure you're violating any kind of warranty if you mess it up or whatever. So it's your choice to do it. We're just showing you what a recommended approach on Pinsight is. and hope you find it helpful. We got good feedback on your videos too. It was entertaining and informative. So if you haven't checked it out, go to the Buffalo Pinball YouTube channel. Check it out. I gotta say, Nick did a good job but Martha really stole the show. Her camera work and commentary really took it to the next level. Yeah. This is like what it's like living in the house. First of all, her camera work, she likes to zoom in on any dolls. so like i'm working on the pair and all of a sudden i'm watching the video and it's going over to the black knight doll and that was my favorite part and she's freaking out come over here look at this where this rail is touching it he's like it's bubbling up and then martha just slow pans over till the night does like a a top to bottom view of the black knight it's amazing yeah she's freaking out and like the uh the video where like i have the heated iron in my hand where you can't necessarily see it on camera but i'm waving this heated iron around and like Martha knows, like, I'm a very, like, kind of absent-minded professor type. Like, I'm always in my, like, head and kind of bumbling around. So she was terrified from the get-go. And finally at the end of that kind of, like, segment, she's like, put it away. Like, you're going to burn me. But I have a report that Martha was not burned, I think, because we were being watched over by a higher power. That's right. It's all good. Tune in for that. Anything else going on in your game room? No. I have, like, I think a message. you i have some fomo going on where it's like i told you i'm taking like one step forward uh one step back for hopefully two big steps forward because i'm really really bullish on pinball and i want to expand my collection your thing but like i'm like man should i get uh guns and roses like that will delay some of my plans i i don't know sounds like um you know they had been having issues early on it sounds like those were fixed and like everyone seems to love the game so i don't know maybe maybe this summer i'll i'll get one i i don't know that's my only my thought there and that's where i'm at i had a also um i was texted a message from a friend to ask on um q a for the podcast this comes from lisa cost and she says what game what game makes me think of martha uh so that's an easy one that's an easy one lisa cost it's uh it's dolly parton because martha's a dolly parton fan so there you go we saw dolly parton at uh our park years ago because Martha likes Sally. Can we take a survey of chat? Which game makes you think of Martha? RLM says Bad Girls. That would have been my pick, too. What game makes you think of Martha, Kevin? Bad Girls. It might just be top of mind because of that card she did for the... Oh, shit, you should have loaded up that card and we can show down there. I know, I don't have it. It's on the Buffalo Pinball Discord, and it's on our Facebook page as well. Got her trading card now. There you go, it's official. Her Walter Day trading card. Everybody gets a trading card. we invested early in bad girls in 2017 and we held all along because i knew it would pay off one day to the moon you're taking it to the moon they get to the moon bad girls to the moon okay by christmas two votes for bad girls in chat mac jedi also yeah all right that's it for my updates okay all right what do we got nice oh we got we're gonna it's not an official review but given the fact that nick's been spending uh some quality time with the black knight they've and getting a little more intimate over the past month. We wanted to go back and revisit Black Knight Sword of Rage and give you an update. You know, Nick's playing it on current code. He's had more in-depth time with the game. So, Nick, why don't you take us through Black Knight Sword of Rage, what you've been thinking about, if you've been enjoying it or not, etc. So we did review the game when it came out, and I think we both gave it like a 7.5, something like that, right, Kev? Yeah, I can go to the website here. So I want to do a segment called Black Knight Sword Rage Revisited. Maybe we'll do this for some other games, you know, because code develops and things change or we spend more time on it. And when we do reviews, you know, there's two approaches. Sometimes we do a hot take when we haven't spent much time on it, and then we'll do a review. Well, we at least played enough games. So I wanted to come back to this because now I have it in the home environment. It's easier to dive into the games. You appreciate it when you're not throwing money into it, when you're not in a noisy bar, when you can kind of control the environment and the lighting on it. So I'm going to go down and kind of do a revisit review of the game and let you know because I really like this game. I like it a lot to the point where I think I want this in my collection one day. That's big for you. I like to share that. And I also think that this game is underrated. I think that it sort of got lost in the mix of other games that came out around the time, because let's face it, Star Wars has been putting out a lot of good games in the last several years. So it's hard to kind of stand out in the mix sometimes with these things, and I think this game didn't get enough credit at the time because the toy was really cool, but I think it got slapped for having a barren play field. I want to try to do it justice, because I think you can still get this game, and I am definitely recommending it. and I call this game like Iron Man 2.0. All right, so especially if you like Iron Man, you love Iron Man, if you have Iron Man in your collection, and you're a fan of Iron Man pinball, I think this is a game that you shouldn't sleep on. Definitely check it out. I predict that over time it will be one of those games that comes to be appreciated, and I don't think that there's a lot of them out there compared to a lot of other titles that was recently released. so you know who knows if they'll ever rerun it who knows if the price will shoot up but that's just that's my hunch i remember i compare this to iron man too because i remember when iron man came out um it was kind of slept on it didn't sell much people kind of didn't get it they didn't like it and then once once it kind of got out there more people played it they loved it and you couldn't buy it anymore and that's why they've rerun iron man like i don't i think they're up to like three times now or something like that i can see this having a lot of similarities to it so let's talk about the gameplay um simply said it's just fun to shoot you know i i think that steve richie look steve richie is not just the king of flow but the king of shots he knows how to make a shot feel good he gets it you can look at the game and say oh there you know there's not there's not much stuff on the game but it doesn't matter if if the stuff on the game or the shots in the game are fun and feel good that's what matters more than anything there can be playfields that are packed with stuff, but the shots suck. They don't feel good. That's not what you want. You just want that. I get a rush playing this game, which is like Iron Man 2.0. This is the first game since Iron Man where I felt that adrenaline rush. I also felt like the game was fighting back. It feels like a battle on Iron Man. It feels like a battle against the Black Knight on Black Knight Sword of Rage. That's like my type of game, my type of style. These short, these brutal these kind of like really difficult crushing games um there's not a lot of games like that you know like walking dead is a game that can be brutal but i don't feel like walking dead's fighting back at me i just want to draw that distinction even with like all the magnets and stuff like that i feel like walking dead is a real ass kicker and it's fighting the the well walker and the and the prison it'll throw the ball back at you and kill you yeah you know what i i i I don't find that on there. You would think that, Kevin. So, like, the Well Walker, especially on the premium, has a magnet. The magnet really doesn't do much. It's kind of funny. I was saying the other day on the stream, the magnet on the Well Walker, it might as well not be there. Because it just doesn't, it will grab it when you, like, start him. It doesn't even, like, really throw it much. You know, yeah, you could say it's dangerous hitting it off of it. But even then, it sort of deadens it, the way it kind of maybe almost, like, falls back. So I don't feel like I'm fighting back. And then the magnet in the prison doesn't, like, fling it or fast or anything like that. The worst-case scenario, it holds it and drops it down the middle, which is just frustration. So that's a tough – it could be a short-playing game. It could be brutal, but I don't feel like I'm fighting back. Whereas with Black Knight, you miss a shot. It's coming like a fastball down the middle right at you. You hit that flail. It's flying at you. You hit the Black Knight dead center. It's going to – you've got to be ready, man. so it's definitely way more fighting back than Walking Dead can ever hope to be and again you can just look at the two games and think that Walking Dead should be that feeling but it doesn't give it to me Iron Man or this game does this game has one more game, one more game, one more game thing when I first got it in the house a couple weeks ago I just like two hours passed like that I was just addicted to hitting the start and playing again and I can do this time, I can get it this time kind of feeling, which is fantastic. Again, Iron Man vibes all the way with it. Let's talk about the lighting. I think I never really appreciated the lighting on it when we first played it. We did a bro show on it. We reviewed it and all that stuff. Once I got in the house and was able to control the lighting and darken it in the room, it's really good, and I don't know how much the code has changed, but there's moments where I don't know if any other game does this, but the backbox actually fades. the lighting in it will kind of turn off and fade in certain moments yeah jurassic park will do that too okay it was just a really nice touch the the wheels nice the choreography i think tim sexton like killed i think he's a really he really gets like lighting in a pinball game um very very well done that was one of the first things he did there i think right was he did lighting i can't remember what the first game was but he did he worked on a game before black knight and he i think i feel yeah maybe maybe it was yeah but it just really stands out right like you know lighting is you talk about guns and roses and lighting i haven't seen it yet obviously it doesn't have that level of lighting but for what it has in the game it's just like you you can tell he knows what he's doing and there a lot of thought went into it and the choreography just works in that game i think it gave me a migraine the other day when i was playing in the dark but it was worth it Worth it The sound and the music in the game it fantastic It gets you pumped with that metal soundtrack They put in an alternative soundtrack. I guess that was a more recent update, and I like that. You asked me about the alternative soundtrack. When I switch to it, I'm like, it's almost like a coin toss. I think I appreciate the original one, the default one, but the alternative one works, and it's really nice to have that option. And it's nice that the alternative soundtrack is not bad, right? So you can switch it up and kind of just add more variety to the game, which is really cool. It's like these nice touches in the game that I totally appreciate. You know, the call-outs are amazing. I was telling you the other day, Kevin, that this game taunts more shit, I think, than any other pinball game. I fucking love it. Steve Ritchie is just hilarious, the Steve Ritchie voice in Black Knight. I think there's gotta be like 10 different ways that he calls you a loser it's just so fucking hilarious it gets you fucking pumped and amped and like wanting to fight him you're like loser he calls you like a baby and he makes baby noises like beep boop beep boop I just fucking start cracking up like fuck this guy it's great it might not be the game for you if you have narcissism issues but if you're okay, if you're comfortable in your own skin then enjoy it this game is so mean and so cruel like what's funny is like this game is for pinball people and you know it is for pinball people because it's a black knight theme um it's not for casual people whatsoever like this game did not do well in location it is such a fucking ass kicker it is so hard but like if if you're a pinball person you're you're a player uh and you can appreciate that the ass kicking you're gonna get in the taunting oh my god this this is the game for that dude they nailed it i I absolutely love it. Then you got, you know, Ed Robertson doing some call-outs. There is that, I think if you hit, like, this one shot over and over, he'll keep on saying, super features boosted or something like that. And I just fucking just laugh. Like, maybe introduce a little more variety there. But I love that. Ed did such a great job. I love that he's in the game. Like, that's super cool. Call-outs, music, fantastic. I love it. There's some, here's the one downer, and I don't get it. I'm really confused by it. So when you get into the Night Multiball, I guess there's two of them. It goes into, like, the first one's, like, the Black Knight 1 retro mode. So it has, like, the Black Knight 1 retro sounds. But it plays the Black Knight UK music, which we all love, right? You know, I almost bought, like, the Black Knight 2000 just for that music. It's fucking great. The problem is that I don't get it. It's almost like the music that – it is the music from Black Knight 2000, but the sound quality is almost like a placeholder. Like it needs to be fine-tuned or something. It sounds muddied. Martha described it as it sounds like they recorded it with a cell phone. Now, I know it's from the 80s, but I've heard Black Knight 2000. You can listen to it on YouTube. I've heard it because we had a Black Knight 2K on location. That sounds great. I mean, yeah, it sounds like 80s quality, but it's great. There's something wrong with it. It needs to be re-engineered or tuned up. Again, I can't help but think it was just like a placeholder and they meant to go back and make it sound better. But it's really disappointing because when you hear that music, you kind of want to get pumped for it because it's a harder multiball to get to. But when the sound quality is kind of muddied and buried or something, what they should have done there is create a pinball moment where that soundtrack is louder than the soundtrack for the rest of the game. Just really amp it up. Right, because it is a missed opportunity in a moment. And it's the kind of thing it seems like they can go back and fix with code. So I'm hopeful they'll listen to us a little bit. I reached out to Tim. I tried to contact him before this because I wanted to ask him some questions, and I wanted to do this just because I really like this game. I really want to hype it a little bit because I think you still get it. I don't want people to miss out on a game, again, especially if you're an Iron Man fan. Unfortunately, he didn't get back to us. So I'm going to do my best to kind of talk through this stuff. But I want to get to the rules. And I think this is where the game still needs some work to get to something really special. And, by the way, I have not played the Premium or LE. I think the Pro is a fantastic game. I can't see how the upper play field helps the game. I think it would just slow it down in my book. And I was talking to James about this from Rochester. James was asking if he were selling that game. Like, no, dude, if anything, I'm going to buy this game. And I guess he used to own a Pro, and he's like, the Pro's better. And you know James. James can buy any game, right? He'll buy a premium LE, though it's not like a budget constraint or something like that. He'll get the game he wants, and I think he's got excellent taste in games. So I've heard that from other people. Again, I think that what makes this game special is it's such a fast game, man. So the Pro's great. Anyways, let's get to the rules. I think the biggest issue for me in the rules is it's just not obvious some of the things that are in the game. It doesn't do a good job communicating to the player. I'm going to get to maybe the biggest thing. I'm going to build up to it. First of all, rage to me doesn't make sense. So the game is called Black Knight Sword of Rage. One of the things in the game is, like, there's a sword that's kind of always on the LCD screen, and you charge it by hitting the drop targets. And once it's charged, you activate it by hitting, like, the black knight shot, and it makes, like, the modes easier. So that's cool, right? Like, I think you get more points. It makes the modes easier. But there's also rage inserts. So when you roll over the inlanes, it spells rage, and it gives you a call out that rage is lit or something like that. But that's just lighting a mystery. Why is rage a mystery? Yeah, it's like two playfield features for the same, like, name. They should have called it something else. Like, you've got the sword of rage. Yeah, and it doesn't build up the sword thing, right? Like, it's just rage is later a rage. Why is it a mystery? I don't know. It's really weird. It's like there's a disconnect between what's written on the playfield and the call-outs and the rules. and it's really confusing as you're trying to figure it out and i'm not i'm not a dummy right like i'm i can verb and digest and understand rules so that's odd um it doesn't really there's like super features in the game like super spinner super slings and stuff uh it doesn't really explain much in terms of them like i don't have a concrete idea of how to start the super features not obvious how to start super features I think I know what shot it is I don't know what it takes to light the shot or if it's always available to me so that's kind of weird because super features are kind of important in the game but the biggest craziest thing to me is I messaged you I was like you're never going to guess how you collect a super jackpot like you're never going to fucking guess I guess Tim changed this recently or he's trying something out with it and i don't necessarily think it's a bad idea but this just goes into like so confusing so what was happening when i was playing is i would see like it would flash on the screen like um super jackpot 100 000 and i fucking laughed it was like 100 000 super jackpot what is going on i didn't think i was in multiball or anything i could not figure it out for the life of me and what's really weird is that in front of the knight there's an insert that says super and you would think that when that's lit that's a super jackpot it's not it's to activate a super feature the right off the bat it's just like it's really like what the fuck is going on with this right the way you collect a super jackpot is activating the magna save and then having you know the ball capture the magsafe capture the ball and rolling over that um in lane but that's kind of that's kind of creative you know it's there's the intentionality of having to do that but it's super not i had to go online and was like what the fuck how am i getting the super jackpot i i i think i have an idea of how you build a super jackpot up i think it's from the super features but also it doesn't tell you like on iron maiden like what the uh value of the super jackpot is you know on iron maiden you know what the value of the super jackpot is so you can figure out when to cash it out i don't think it ever says what the value is so even when you you're just guessing when you're going to cash it out it seems like a very unsatisfying way to get like a super jackpot like i want to do somet hing with the flippers to get the super jackpot not like hit the April button and hope the magnet grabs it and throws it down the right end lane and not, yeah, I'm not, I'm not convinced that that, I thought that was bad. I'm not convinced that that's because I understand that. I think he's trying to have this be an intentionality thing. Right. But you gotta have some, you gotta have some call-outs. You gotta have some direction. You've got to indicate somehow that it's ready or maybe it does, or it just gets buried in there and it's easy to miss. And you also need to show what the current value of the super jackpot is on the screen. Yeah. I don't know, man. It's just like this is a really weird game in terms of understanding what the hell is going on. It's not like a deep game either. It shouldn't be like that. Okay. The pro also feels lacking in multiball content. when I was when I had this in here that I was not getting multiball and I you really got to go for multiball and stuff like you know how like a lot of games they'll have like an easily achievable multiball for casual players like casual players probably never get to multiball in this game which is fine I'm okay with them creating like a game for pinball players like I'm cool with that but what ends up happening in the game is that um you only see the um what I forget what it's called the three night multiball where you know the lock is the lock shot you only see that and then maybe you get the one the retro multiball and that's it like that's how all my games are i've never even got to the second like retro multiball so it feels like the game only has two multi-balls in it now the premium le has a catapult multiball they have one more multiball but like why not add catapult multiball by like you know clearing the drop targets x amount of times because it helps casual players start a multiball and it also is just like it's a weird weird that there's like no multi-balls in the game kind of feeling yeah especially for a game that's that hard like yeah it would give you an opportunity to play with a little bit of a safety net if you were able to play in control and it's a really hard game i or i mean i guess another thing that they could do is have one of the modes be like a two ball multiball like iron maiden does right like yeah um but yeah it's really devoid of multi-balls and it just feels like that's a a problem or issue yeah it gets the game starts to feel a little samey after a while so would you the the thing i said to you when we were talking about this game is like i i agree i i always enjoyed playing this game when we would go to your location that had it it would be the game that i played because yeah it was newer and uh i don't know it's you know like you said it's got it's got that pinball player kind of vibe to it i really appreciated it and it definitely has that one more game feel because if you can get really close to starting the multiball or like setting up the multiball with a mode stack to really kind of get it going um do you see this game being a long-term keeper because to me it feels like more of a fun for a while kind of game or maybe good in a bigger collection kind of game what's your take on that yeah that's that's a really good question, Kev. You know, my first game was Ironman. And for me, that was a phenomenal first game because it's so... You know, it's so dangerous. The ball's going to come... Sometimes games are ass-kickers like that where the ball's coming back at you a lot and be really engaging, right? And you can't just build up the muscle memory because you've got to learn to nudge and do some saving. And I think that's what keeps it fresh. So for me, yes. For me, it could be even a good first game. For me, it could be a game in a big collection. I think it just depends on, do you like the style of an Iron Man type of game that's not necessarily deep, shorter playing, but absolutely brutal and the game fights you back? If yes, then you need to buy this game. So I want this game in my collection. I totally do. It has a great place in it. I love it. I think it's really good. But if you don't like that style, if you don't like Iron Man, then I don't think you're going to like this game. So what you're saying is pinball is subjective, and everybody likes different things. it's weird yeah it's understanding what you like in a in a in a game right you know if like i think i i think i did a good job of articulating how this game is and what kind of a player it's going to appeal to yeah no that's good it's just funny because as streamers and stuff people always come to me and be like what's your favorite game and i'm like i don't really have a favorite game i have a lot of different types of games that i like or a certain style of game and even though i like it you probably won't like it or maybe you will if you have similar tastes so there's a lot of subjectivity in all of this and uh yeah i always keep that in mind when we're talking about games the other thing i would say in the rules and i think this is minor but it can help is that i think in the modes you're sort of fighting these bosses these monsters um you know ever since deadpool added in the kind of health bar of who you're fighting i think it would be a welcome addition to this game as well you know so it will say like three shots left so it does do a good job of communicating that but um maybe a health bar too because it does feel more like a fight it's sort of that like connection to what's going on in the game so yeah the uh the album mode for appetite for destruction and guns and roses has like a one-on-one battle like that yeah uh and you're battling the two characters that were originally in their artwork that the dirty robot and whatever the other guy is and uh i i did it the other day and i did it without getting hit and it gave me a flawless victory like Mortal Kombat. I was like, hell yeah. That was really good. Yeah, I like that. It makes you feel great when it's like, yeah, I kicked his ass, you know. Yeah, when you're fighting a boss, like putting a health bar in there unicates a lot to the player. Like you're used to health bars and you're used to fighting something. It makes sense. And again, Deadpool has convinced me that when you have that style mode, you kind of need that now. Agreed. I think it's with the new generation of pinball programmers kind of like bringing the video game mindset into pinball, which I love it personally. You know, maybe not for everybody, but I like it a lot. The LCD, I won't say too much. I think they did a fantastic job with the LCD, you know, so. Yeah, I like the LCD on Black Knight a lot. The animations are really good. Yeah, the toy, I think, is easily one of the best toys in pinball. The Black Knight toy is, I fucking love it. It's amazing, well done. Even just the detail, the glowing red eyes and how it flashes and stuff. it just brings so much personality to the game that makes it that battle and I know Martha likes the feather in it a lot, she's a fan and then Topper man I never would buy a Topper but I would buy this fucking Topper this Topper is amazing this Topper is the best Topper in pinball and I think when the Sturm released it was $4.99 and now it's selling for $2, 000 or $3, 000 on the secondary market that might be a teaser for topper talks stay around yeah please please stern just rerun it i would almost i swear to god i would almost pay a thousand dollars for that topper and this is from somebody who does not like toppers turn just rerun it and charge a little bit more but don't get don't get too stupid with it but i think here's what you could do with this game you buy the pro and then even the you buy the topper and i think you make out really good with this game if if they can even get the topper at a quote-unquote reasonable price but arthur made the i think a good observation that if it had the topper on the game on location we probably made it made a lot more money in this game because people would have seen that topper it's some fucking amazing yeah that's definitely a topper that would draw people in i feel like if you had it on location though you need to do like the the tub on top of it like the fucking yeah like try to rip it off or i know i love that topper man it's really good love it i do too because it's it's going with the black knight moving and taunting yeah like it's it's great i told you when i had jurassic park i was I hope they do a Black Knight-style topper with dinosaurs up there roaring and doing stuff. And instead it's like flat plastics and some LEDs. And it's like, well, I saved myself $600 or whatever it was. Yeah. Look, Stern just rerun it. There's a market for it when people are charging $3, 000. You can charge a little bit more. You don't have to gouge your customers. There's something about goodwill, especially when there's competition, right? Like let's not make the market just for the ultra-wealthy. Let's not do that to pinball. could still make plenty of profit and get it out there. Listen, what the hell do I know? But I really, really want that. All right. I think that's going to do it for this episode of Brody, Eve, and Talk Pinball. But stick around for after the show, we've got the highlight of the show, Topper Talk with Goran. Before that, be sure to follow us on social media. We're on Twitter, and all those things. You can email us, talkpinball at gmail.com. If you've got questions, comments, feedback, and the like. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to us on Twitch to support the show. If you have Amazon Prime, you can use that to subscribe at no extra charge. We would appreciate it. It helps us keep the LED lights on and the new pinball machines rolling in for you guys to watch us stream. There's a PayPal link if you prefer doing it that way. If you want to support the show without dropping any money, you know, times are tough. You want to just be able to support the show in another way. You can review us on your podcast platform of choice. Nick, any closing words? No, I'm good, man. Thanks for watching us. Thanks for supporting us. Oh, by the way, you can watch me do my lunchtime thing on Fridays if you haven't heard. That's right. I should be able to work home even during the pandemic on Fridays, even when the pandemic's over. So I think this is going to be a permanent fixture. Nice. And you've got a VR golf thing coming up, right? This afternoon? Yeah. All right. If you want to stick around, I'm going to stream. So here's the cool thing. Shout out to Ryan Dye of West Virginia Pinball. Ryan was always kind of helping out and volunteering with Pinberg. He has started up a VR mini golf league. We're in week two right now. First limited to 16 people. We're like, dude, there's more than that. We have 26 people signed up for this. It's a ton. it's like i think everybody's a pinball person um and we get together and we play vr mini golf and he's keeping track and he's using a pinberg style format for scoring so it's fantastic i'm going to stream that at two o'clock today so about an hour and 12 minutes on this channel um check it out if you're curious it's it's i i'm i'm having a blast it's getting my kind of competitive fix but also connecting with um a lot of people that i i don't know but who are in the pinball community um something along those lines i meant to mention this earlier so another like way to connect with the pinball community right now is we have a land party night tonight on cosmic heart racing on the p3 so if you have that game and you want to play with us uh jump in the cosmic heart racing or in the the p3 owners discord um uh i think there's a link to that in the owner's thread on pin side um jump in there we uh we talk trash on the on the voice chat in there we we coordinate matches there's an in-game lobby and everything that makes it really easy uh i know we've got at least uh five or six people lined up for that tonight so we're really looking forward to that um some online pinball play um head-to-head action during the pandemic is always a good time so uh ways to find ways to stay connected with uh your pinball friends uh as as well as we can until we get back to the the real thing and playing in person together. So with that, let's take you right into Topper Talk and we will see you guys next month with another show. Thanks. the gameplay experience. You must buy one now. It's your monthly fill of toppers right now. Topper Talk with Goran. Oh, hello. I almost didn't see you there. Welcome to another episode of Topper Talk with Goran, the part of the podcast where Kevin and Nick give me about three to five minutes to talk about everything going on in the ever-changing and profitable topper industry. Today we're going to talk about something a little bit different than we usually have been talking about. We're going to do a very quick and brief overview of the topper industry and also how the prices have changed over time. We're going to do a little bit of a how it started and how it's going type thing. So with that being said, let's jump over to the computer and get right into it. Okay, so let's take it from the beginning to the early origin of toppers. So back in the 80s and 90s, there were a lot of pinball machines that included toppers, complementary with the game. They really were a part of the overall design and artwork of the game. And remember, early on in pinball, it was an operator's business. You needed to be able to attract customers and players to play your game. So that's what the purpose of toppers were. You see with Whitewater, you had a very nice and visually pleasing topper here that really blended in nicely with the backbox artwork. You don't see Whitewater written twice here. You have your Translight imagery, and then you have the topper on top. Whirlwind did something a little different, actually. It actually had an interactive topper that truly enhanced the gameplay experience. There was a fan during certain modes that would activate to really make you feel like you're in the Whirlwind. So that's really the early origin of toppers. This is how it all started, in my opinion. So moving on, you know, toppers started to die out as manufacturers decided, you know, ended up leaving the pinball business. Stern was really the only pinball manufacturer around for a long time, and they didn't really have a need for toppers because people were going to buy their pinball machines no matter what. And, you know, the only topper we saw for a while were the tournament play toppers that could be purchased with the tournament kits. But that's nothing special. Certainly didn't enhance the gameplay experience. But once again, it served the purpose of relaying information or attracting players over to the game. So let's continue on here. So then, you know, a couple of years ago, we start to see modders enter the pinball business or industry where people could spend money and buy unofficial upgrades for their machines. And this is where pinball started to transition from not only an operator's hobby or an operator's business to a collector's hobby. So, you know, you could buy extra shooter rods, extra lighting, side blades. Well, this is where companies like Laserific entered the game and started to make their own unofficial toppers that you can put onto the game. Because if you want to bling out your game, that's the thing that you could do. Here's just a screenshot of some of the toppers on their website. Not too expensive. they're nothing special, but they look nice if toppers are your thing. Like, I enjoy toppers. It's a great way to get a topper on your pin. So then, you know, we start to see some new manufacturers enter the pinball game that are other than Stern. You know, some manufacturers that maybe are a little bit more premium, like Jersey Jack Pinball, for example, that started to include toppers with some of their games at no cost. You know, you have the 75th anniversary version of Wizard of Oz that has a nice topper on top. Not interactive, nothing special. It's nice to look at. You start to get into the habit of saying the game name twice on the toppers, but it's a thing. It's not bad. Once again, it doesn't cost you anything, in my opinion. If you can fit it in your basement or whatever it is, it's nice to look at. We get to the collector's edition where you got, I think, one of the best toppers included, which is the ship-in-the-bottle topper that actually interacts and moves with the game. And once again, no cost, no extra cost. It's already banked into the cost of the game, of course. So then, you know, people are now starting to make toppers. Jersey Jack is including toppers complimentary. So Stern sees money on the table. They realize that pinball is moving into being a collector's hobby. So we start, you know, we start to see Stern roll out some toppers. I have the Beatles topper, 400 bucks. It's a little pricey, but it's a collector's hobby. People are willing to pay it. So then, you know, we now start to get into the premium topper business where people like Leor's makes the Hobbit topper that's over $1, 000 and other mod makers as well. And we start to see the prices go up and up for non-factory approved toppers. Well, Stern doesn't want to leave money out on the table. So what does Stern do? They start releasing toppers that are really just bad toppers that don't enhance the gameplay experience at all and start charging $1, 000 for it. Well, you know, and the truth is, there are people, there are LE buyers in this hobby and CE buyers that will pay that money. And with everything in the pandemic, prices have gone up. So what happens? We now start to see secondhand topper prices go up $3, 500, $2, 500 for toppers, which is ridiculous and astronomical. So this is a little bit of how it started, where it's going, and my take on overall Topper history and pricing. Well, that's going to do it for this episode. Tune in to the next podcast to see another episode of Topper Talk with Gorin. And remember, get out there and buy a Topper. Thank you for coming to my Topper Talk.