Welcome everyone to season two, episode six of the Fresh Pinball Podcast. This is part two of the Pinball 2000 episode. Part two of 2000. Part 2000, if you will. Part 2000, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty excited. To my left sits on the board, Mr. Kyle. Mr. Kyle, how are you this fine evening? I'm flipping fantastic. Love it. Sitting across from me, Corbin. Corbin, how we feeling? Feeling good, feeling good. Been moving a lot of pinballs, getting ready. A lot of spooky pinballs. We're moving a lot of spooky pinballs around. We'll get into that, though. It's a pin brew. Yeah, we're going to take a... We've been really productive. I feel like the past two days, it's like, man, if I was productive at this level every day, shit, who knows what we'd get there. I feel like a person who actually works the last couple days. Seriously, that's what I'm saying. I don't love it. I'm hitting four or five places. I'm not getting appointments with people. We're going to put pinballs on the moon. We've been showing up places. Who's on the moon? 2025. To my right, Zach. Zach, how are we doing tonight? Most excellent. I have a lot of fresh pinball around right now, actually, so can't be mad. So we're in Zach's basement again, and I got here before everyone else and Zach's boys. As soon as I walk in, take me by the hand and drag me out to the garage to tell me that there's fresh pinball and that there is a game still in the box, and they're looking at me like, can we open it? Let's open it now. Can we open it? As soon as I got home, they're like, let's open it. Pinball Jeff, can we open the pinball now? And it's like, no. We're going to wait on that one. You've got to wait for some people. It's crazy to think that. So there's 12 pinballs right now in this place. Damn, we got them up. It's crazy to think that it's like sitting next to the new in box. It's like, oh, there's the Barry O's. The Barry O's barbecue. Barbecue. And sitting next to Pulp Fiction in a box. Well, and then they take me upstairs to show me the box forts that they've made out of the previous fresh pinballs. It's like, man, you guys are living the actual dream right now. The box dream. I don't realize it, but they're peaking right now. They are. They have no clue. Living the dream. Living the best. As soon as I got here, Ollie grabbed my hand and said, fresh pinball? Fresh pinball? Yeah, took me out to show me. Yeah, he couldn't understand when I dropped off the Pulp Fiction in the garage this morning. He's like, what? I think he was explaining the layout to me a little bit, too. He'll tell you the shots. He'll tell you the shots. You want to hit the ramp here with the spinner? Yeah, exactly. He's like, there's a spinner on these ramps. Spinner ramps. All right, so a quick fact check from the previous episode. We talked about some of the operator slash security features on Pinball 2000 to where you could turn a key and take off the lockdown bar, pull the glass, be able to fix stuck balls, do all of that fun stuff. And that reminded me that it's not the only time that I've seen that. I actually have a baby Pac-Man that has a similar feature. It has a key on the left-hand side if you're facing the game. Unlock it. releases the control panel then you can pull the glass and do all of that fun stuff so i think when we talk to mr gomez that's something that maybe we should ask about you know their current style of lockdown bar obviously prohibits that but maybe you know on pro only i don't know something that's made specifically for operators like i think it would be cool it's been very interesting talking to other operators and just the love of the pros from these operators like we were last night we were up a madcap and And everybody loves these – they love the pros. They just think they're so reliable and they don't want to mess with them, I guess. I don't know. I've just – it's blowing my mind. But at the same time, Matt was talking about – like he's not afraid to put other off-the-wall stuff out there. Oh, no, absolutely not. Yeah, definitely not because he had his Lebowski out there. I mean he also messes with Multimorphic, which is like – Yeah, I was curious if I was still a GC on that Pulp Fiction out there. Probably not at this point. We didn't even check. We were in and out of there. I think the Carl Weathers would have been better. The Carl Weathers was about to come. I think he posted a picture and it said like high scores. And then I think there was nothing there. Like, damn it. I wonder if my rituals are still in there. Yeah. So close. So second item on the fact check is Corbin asked me if the Sega Batman Forever, what sort of DMD that was. And I think if I was listening back correctly, said that it was like the thin, longer one. And it's not. It's actually a large format DMD. Oh, it's the same as Frankenstein. It's like Frankenstein Baywatch. That's what I thought. Which one am I thinking of then? Yeah. Okay. So I don't know why in my mind. On that one we got for Frankenstein. The Dead East. It was on that list, yeah. Because it's like that Baywatch. I think there's maybe Frankenstein, maybe one more. The Dead East. Star. Star Trek. Star Trek. Has that. Hulk, I think, has that thin one. Yeah, the small one. Yeah, okay. So that's what it was because I ended up, I went back to my pictures from TPF and confirmed, and then I went on to colordmd.com. When you say that, that totally makes sense, though. You know what else has that? You know what other game has that? What? Jeff's favorite game of all time. Baywatch? Checkpoint. Checkpoint. Checkpoint. Checkpoint doesn't have the oversized one. It has the smaller one, right? Oh, the tiny one. Yeah, yeah. So Checkpoint's the first DMD game, right? Yeah. Ever. That's what I thought. That's very crazy. Because they moved around the release of something else to get that out. Another license, like Porsche. They had a Porsche license? Oh, is that a Chicago, Illinois call? It might be. Hello? Hello? Is it working? No. Switch him and just talk to him on the phone. Yeah, you there? You there? We're trying to get you ported in here. Breaking news. We have a caller on the line. We will continue the fact check after this brief interview. Mr. Gomez, thank you so much for taking some time to hop onto the podcast with us. We're excited to talk some Pinball 2000. Hey, guys. Great to talk to you. I can't imagine that in 2024 anyone cares about Pinball 2000. Oh, yeah, we care. Happy to talk to you about it. Yeah, so we're old school nerds of the history of pinball, going all the way back to Anjali Zac Stark novelty. Corbin and Zach's family have been in pinball and operating for over 100 years. So literally their family goes all the way back to the genesis of everything. And on a previous episode before we had you on, we talked about them actually getting their new in-box Revenge from Mars and the excitement that was surrounding all of that. Putting it all together, something completely new and different. Excitement slash concern, I feel like. It was definitely a little bit of both at the time. But yeah, yeah, we've had that one. We've had the Revenge since new in-box, and then we did acquire, of course, the Star Wars and then the Kit, too, because it seems cool. Yeah, so maybe start by taking us back to that era. I mean, you were integral in all of the creation of Pinball 2000. You know, tell us what the vision was and kind of put us in the time machine and take us way back. Yeah, so, you know, in probably, I want to say, 97, 96, 96 or 97, the pinball market was definitely contracting for the company. It was getting smaller, and the company was beginning to try to figure out, you know, how to reinvent itself out of the, you know, out of the situation, if you will. The, you know, they put out, now you have to remember the product development, everybody in product development was focused on designing whatever game they were working on there were i think if i recall seven six or seven design teams everybody was on a cadence in their games you know meaning that you know the company the company basically launched i believe it was a Valley title and a Williams title in the fall of every year. And maybe there was another, I can't remember what the cadence was, maybe there was another couple of games launched in the spring. But regardless, teams were working in staggered fashion towards their games. And Neil Nicastro and Kenny Fedesna, Neil was the CEO. Kenny ran product development. and they came down and they said, you know, we've got the situation, you know, we want you guys to think about what could be the future of pinball, what could we do to transform the game in a significant way from what we knew at the time. And honestly, at that particular moment in time, we had done, you know, we had done a lot of things within the context of, of what the game was, you know, we, a lot of toys had continued to evolve. All the mechs and everything from that era are just, I mean, one after another, each game had something different, something unique that, you know, makes that game that made that game, you know, different, you know, whether it's the theater, the box on theater, I can, they're endless. Each game had something very unique. We had a lot of that 96, 97 period. I mean, we're big NBA fast break fans here. So the best. Yeah. So, I mean, that, you know, so fast break that in and of itself. I was I was trying new stuff. Right. I was trying to completely, you know, completely different scoring, you know, scoring theme to the game, the ability to connect and link games and play head to head. That's those are fairly people love it. Fairly radical ideas. They are. And they love it. Once they understand it and you get them in an organized fashion and you get them, like, proud to what they're doing, people who normally, sometimes girlfriends, or just anybody who isn't normally as excited, you put them in front of those fast breaks, though, and get them going, it makes them, they get excited about the moment. The competition comes out. The competition comes out. Yeah, fast breaks, linked fast breaks to this day draw a crowd wherever you see them. I mean, there's no question. Yeah, we tour our set that we have, and we'll do events and, you know, tournaments with them. But, yeah, anywhere we take them, we pop up with them, it's guaranteed to draw a crowd. Yep, yep. So, yeah, I mean, so we were trying a lot of different things. And you can tell, I mean, pass break in and of itself, right, a game in the backbox, a new scoring technique, right, and connect the games, right? So, I mean, I was trying everything. Yeah. And so we started – there was a team that was sort of ready to build another game. So they were sort of in the sweet spot of being able to start when the rest of us were kind of tied up with games. I was tied up with Monster Bash, and I had finished Fast Break, and I had started – I was actually working on Monster Bash. And so the guy that was sort of ahead of me that had a that had the guy amongst all the designers that had like his next game was yet to be conceived. And he had started fooling around with the notion of what does a next gen platform look like was John Papadiuk. And what he did was he had a really convoluted cabinet that sort of folded up, and it was this giant thing. But it had a 26 or 25-inch CRT where the head of the game would have been. Was it reflecting similar to the Pinball 2000? No. Or was it mounted down? No, it was just – no, no, no, no. It was just direct view. Oh, okay, okay. It was direct view. I bet that thing weighed a ton. Yeah. It was insane. It was like – so it was – and honestly, like the thing that motivated me was I thought that's not that clever, right? It's like you just replaced the backbox with a giant TV. Right, right. And so I was like – and I didn't like a lot of things about it. I didn't like the fact that to this day I feel like a back glass is a significant element of pinball. Absolutely, 100%. I think companies that fill the backbox with a monitor and stuff are off base. I think that they're missing a key element of pinball, which is the back glass. You're losing part of the overall art package. The art, yeah. That's right. The art in itself and the back glass, the play field, the cabinet art. I mean the apron, it's all absolutely elements of it that all add to it. Right, right. So as a company, as you guys are going through this, some of the reading and rumors and everything else, I had read and seen that there was Pinball 2000 or what John Papadu was working on that kind of ended up becoming Pinball 2000. You guys were actually on the other side. We're looking at virtual pinball as well. Is there any truth to that? Is that what John Papadu was working on or is that something totally different? No, he was working, like I said, John had taken his, I mean, the project was called Pinball 2000, even when John started it. And it had a backbox, you know, like I said, a giant CRT in the backbox. And yeah, and he had bought a Nintendo, whichever Nintendo, I think a Nintendo 64, I think at the time. And he had hooked a Nintendo 64 to it. And his demo was basically, you know, here's this video game up here playing and here's this pinball machine down here. And, you know, first of all, I remember being at Midway, Bally Midway, back at original Bally Midway where I started. And in those days, you know, the pinball guys did Granny and the Gators and Baby Pac-Man. And that was basically, you know, that was essentially two games. Right. Two separate games, right? You know, you play up here, then you play down here, play up here, play down here. You play the pinball and you play the arcade. Right, right. And John's thing was no different, right? It was like you played up there, you played down here. The newer version of it in a sense. Right. It was two different experiences or, you know, the notion of playing the video game and then playing the pinball machine. Interesting. It was too, you know, to my perception, they were disjointed experiences. Yeah. Right. It was like sort of like, right. It was like saying, I'm going to dedicate the entire backbox to a video mode. Right. Like a Terminator 2 video mode, except that that's, you know, I've got a whole backbox here that's dedicated to this. Now, obviously, yeah, I mean, but obviously, you know, he was going to, you know, Obviously, there would have been presentation events and the back glass would have been a dynamic back glass and all that kind of stuff. Right. So so that's where he was going. Now, I got to tell you that I had my head in Monster Bash and I was half paying attention. I didn't think much of his problem or of his solution. I just didn't. I was kind of like, yeah, you know, that's like it's just like I don't I don't I don't see it. So we most of the development, most of the people up in product development, all the you know, all of the teams didn't have a lot of faith in what he was doing. So there wasn't a lot of, you know, camaraderie about it or there wasn't a lot of guys going walking around the floor going, wow, that's so cool. Yeah, that's our future. You know, in fact, everybody was like, yeah, you know, I've kind of seen that before. I don't get it. You know, and just so there was a lot of that. They really didn't know. It was not Batman and Granny's Gators are OK, but they really wouldn't. I wouldn't say they were successes in a sense like people. They really didn't take. No, they weren't. They weren't. And they were you know, they were they were cool. They were remember they were and they were at a time when when pinball is fighting for its life also. Yeah. Right. So those in those days I was on the midway side and I remember that like, you know, they had closed down the Bensonville Valley Bensonville factory, which was and they had moved. They had late. They had a major layoff. They had consolidated the pinball factory into the video game factory. And we had absorbed a bunch of their staff. You know, that's when I met guys like Jim Patlin stuff, which was when they brought them over and put them with us. over on the video game side. And that was like 1984, right in that time frame. Yeah, 83, 84, right? And so that's when those games happened because pinball was on the ropes. And so that was the driving force between, hey, why don't we integrate pinball with something modern like a video game, et cetera. And video games were so hot back in the early 80s too. They were. I mean, back in 19, you know, when that happened, the, you know, the Midway division was, was the revenues from the Midway division were larger than the revenues for the entire mother company. Oh, I'm sure. My dad talks about that era and remembering just getting truckloads of Pac-Man and Space Invaders. And he said the game. Oh, yeah. The turnover rate. Which is crazy. Which is crazy. Like, you know, you'd have a game. It's insane. Yeah. He said the stories, it would be so, it would have been so crazy to see. But yeah, that's what it sounded like. The games were video games were so hard. Right. So, so now, you know, fast forward to 1998 and, and, you know, and we're in the same, we're in the same boat. Right. Yeah. And so, so one day management has sort of gotten wind of the fact that, Hey, you know, the guys in the guys up in product of the home and are not the guys, you know, they're not that interested in this new version. And so Neil DeCastro, CEO, and Kenny Fedesna, and Larry DeMar, who was, I think at that time, running our group, running product development, they gathered a meeting of all the designers and some of the key software developers. And they posed in a room. And I remember Neil said, you know, if you guys, you know, you're either with this thing or you're not. But, you know, we got to do something. And it was a really depressing meeting because basically nobody in the meeting was very excited about this. And Neil was not a guy to mince words. So, I mean, basically, you know, I mean, I think he alluded to the fact that our future hung on the balance. And so we came out of the meeting, and Pat Lawler and I were kind of talking, and he said, you know what? He said, we got to do something because this is, you know, this is going to go in that direction. And I had tried in the meeting, I had tried to describe to them the, you know, I said, hey, guys, there's another way. There's like, you know, there's a way of combining the video images right down on the play field. And everybody thought I was crazy. But the reality is that it was it was, you know, it was very driven by the work I had done on on on on coin operated upright video games in the early 70s. 70s, I'm sorry, in the late 70s when I broke into the business, I was in Midway and it was very common at the time for us to use a combining mirror. Yeah. Was that Omega Racing? There's a number of them. Yeah. A lot of them. What it did is it allowed us to take the monitor, put it at the bottom of the cabinet so the cabinet wasn't very deep and and you could combine elements of scenery with the elements on a video because back in those days the video hardware wasn't very powerful and so you you couldn't draw scenery like you couldn't draw a moon for space invaders but you could take a plastic vacuum form moon and put it behind you know it's so that so the space invaders looked like they were landing on the plastic moon, right? And so, you know, so those tricks are tricks that I sort of, you know, was exposed to when I was on that side of the house working on cabinet designs and things for the video games. You know, we did a, you know, we had done a game called Cosmic Cruiser, which combined, it looked like the video, you know, it looked like the video elements, like video characters were flying into this spacecraft that was like, and it was a physical three-dimensional plastic spacecraft that was projected into, you know, so that the two images, the video, looked like it was interacting with the three-dimensional plastic element, right? So I had this all in the back of my head. The real twist that I added to it was the notion that if I park of, you know, if I make the interaction, if I can take the video element, like, for the sake of everybody understanding, if you take a Martian, and you can make the Martian look like he's standing on a play field, and I put a rollover switch directly beneath that Martian, when the ball sees that, when the switch sees the ball go over it, I can transform, I can sense that signal and then in essence I can transform that Martian. I can make that Martian blow up. I can make that Martian go away. I can make that Martian grow. I can explode him. I can do all kinds of things with him, right? So that was the whole trick. And by the way, that's what I got a patent on. I got a patent on the coincidence between a virtual object and a real object. The patent's expired, right? The patent's expired now. Definitely. We talked about that a little bit on a previous episode. Yeah, it's sort of expired. You know, it's expired. It's gone. It's like, you know, I think back in those days. Well, it's like 17 years or something that it has, you know, that's valid. So whatever. But that was the magic, right? So I'm in this meeting talking about this. Pat Lawler had been in a similar situation as me at the time. As a matter of fact, I knew him from that time. He had been working at Dave Nutting and Associates. Dave Nutting and Associates was a captive R&D house for Bally Midway. So we used to him and I, we would go to we would see each other at trade shows. We would go to when the company whenever the company went to a trade show after they they would have like sort of an after look after, show report meeting where they would order food and all the designers would be there and everybody would talk about what they saw that was cool or how things compared to things we were working on cetera And so I knew Pat from those days And of course of course this before pinball And then once I joined pinball Pat was you know Pat Pat and I were you know became friends But so but I tell you the story because Pat was very familiar with, you know, the mirror tricks that we did back in those days. Right. Yep. So we came out of we came out of the room and he goes, I know exactly what you're talking about. And I said, well, I know you do because you were there. And I said, but the twist I want to put on it is I think I can sense the ball at that video, you know, objects. I simply put the switch and he he understood immediately. So so we said he said. We got to do something because they're going to go in this direction. if we don't do something, they're going to build that monstrosity that John's pushing. You had a responsibility for pinball. Yeah, we did. And so we said, and I mean, I'm like Pat, I'm up to my ass in Monster Bash. And so I took a, you know, but I was intrigued by the notion that we got to do something, you know. So one night I was working on Monster Bash, and I remember, I'll never forget this, I went in to see Lyman Sheets, who was working on Bash with me, and I had made a foam core model, which I still have. I'll send you guys pictures of it. And I had taken a slide, a 35-millimeter slide I had laying on my desk. It was actually a Johnny Mnemonic slide from when I worked on that project. and I mounted it in such a way with a piece of smoked acrylic to simulate the thing that I was talking about. And I used a flashlight, pointed the flashlight at it, and I could see, hey, this is going to work. So, you know, imagine I put the slide up where the video image would be. I pointed the flashlight down. Once I show you these images, you'll understand what I'm talking about. But so I went running into Lyman's office and I said, check this out. This is going to be so cool. Lyman was like so deep in Monster Bash. You give a shit. You know, he's like he's like, yeah, whatever, dude. Well, you know, whatever turns you on. And so so so I showed it to Pat and Pat says, we got to build this thing. And I said, yeah, we can't build it here. And so he had a shop in his garage out of his house in Marengo. And so we went on this period of time. I don't know what it was. Maybe three, yeah, three, I don't know what it was. It took us three weeks or something. And I drove out to his house. So just after work, you're just like, I'm going to go work on this other thing. Saturdays. Three weeks, that's it. Saturdays, it was like, it was brutal. You know, Saturdays and Sundays we were out there and we built one. And I had this old Amiga 1000 that I had built a bunch of video art on from back in, you know, earlier times when I was working on video games. And I happened to have this big robot that I built in Amiga on Deluxe Paint Animation, which was a program that ran on the Amiga and Electronic Arts made it. And it was a great program at the time. And I loved it. But anyway, so I had this robot. And so we used a 19 inch monitor, hooked my Amiga. And actually, it was the 19 inch monitor that I used to use with the Amiga to simulate the 19 inch monitors that would go into the video games that I was making art for. So so we created this mock up and we brought it in and we had the robot, you know, standing on the play field. And I was big. It was impressive. And, you know, we, what the hell do we call this thing? We called it like, I've got a picture of us standing next to the camera. I'll have to find it and send it to you also. Yeah, we're definitely excited to see. yeah so then you know so we brought this thing in and we did it you know we started getting pressure from from larry saying you guys got whatever you got going on you got to bring it in and and we're like okay so we brought this thing in and we showed it we blew everybody away and and everybody was like oh yeah we're building this is the one we gotta build this and so uh so immediately like they just totally revamped everything and and we you know it became like, okay, you know, we're going to, you know, this is what we're going to do. And so they dropped John Papadiuk's design. Yeah, this is better. They dropped, they dropped John. Was it immediately Revenge from Mars 2 or did you start having a layout and then they decide, you guys decide? No. So what happened is, so what happened there was that very first thing we started working on was before we had a game. First of all, I had a finish bash. So I was finishing up BASH and then while I was finishing up BASH, I was working with the mechanical engineering team on how do we get the glass and the position of the monitor and cabinet and all that kind of stuff. So we started working with that. At the same time, the electronics, the hardware engineers and the software engineers started talking about what does a pinball focused video system look like? Because we didn't have one. Right. We had, you know, whatever we were doing with WPC 95 at the time was it had support for dot matrix display. It didn't have support for full-color video, right? Totally different. So we had, you know, so that was like a whole effort, right? Like those guys went down the path of, you know, and one of the things that they had at the time, they thought that, hey, why don't we use a PC as the basis for the, you know, for the video side, the core side. And then the vision, it turned out to be a flawed vision, but the vision was that as PC technology evolved, we would be able to grow with it. And it turned out it was like, that was a nightmare because like the mother, you know, the PC manufacturers, like they would change the format of their motherboard. And all of a sudden you're like, oh crap. Yeah. Every month. We were like, oh crap. We were just like, so much for that idea. So you're like whatever that was. You know, I don't remember what it was, ATX2 or whatever. And and so they would just change it and you'd be shit out of luck. So a whole nother variable while designing a pinball like, oh, now we're going to change the base of it too. So so they so they went, you know, they were exploring all of that. That that wasn't, you know, and they were exploring that we were daydreaming what the system could be. all the new cool stuff we'll be able to do with it, you know, like service play field maps, and we could connect the games to the Internet and all this stuff, right? Yes, which absolutely is. I have questions about that. We'll get back to that. I have questions about that. Yeah, yeah. And so that went on. We launched Bash, and then we started. And then it was like there was a rule at Midway that the guy that sort of pioneered a technology or, you know, brought a technology to bear was the guy that got to build the first game on it. So that was, you know, that was a standing rule in product development. Like, you know, if you invented a thing, you got to use that thing first. Do you have any good examples of that? him well yeah it's a great one right that's how come I got to do the first game but you know over the years like I'm trying to think like the dot matrix right like I think I think the guy that pushed the dot matrix was Steve Ritchie and T2 and so and so you know it was like his you know T2 I think it was T2 I can't remember with the debut. Yeah, that was and so that was but remember that would have been a different company, right? So, yeah. So, yeah. But at Williams, the deal was if you invent the tech, you get to pioneer it. You get to be the first guy on it. Which makes a ton of sense because you're the visionary behind it. You might as well bring that product to market. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, so I got So I got to do that first game. And then so the conversation started talking about the game and didn't know what we were going to do. And Larry and the sales guys and everybody in the company had been talking. And everybody was like, you know what? Attack from Mars was underserved, meaning that we didn't make enough of them. There was a lot of demand for the game, and it was well-loved. And so they said, why don't we do a sequel to Attack from Mars? And so they came down to see me and they said, you know, what do you think about this? And I said, I'm all right with it. Brian's all right with it. Well, Brian had left the pinball side to go work on the video game side. And so he was across the street at Midway working on his first video game under the Midway flag, which I believe was Arctic Thunder. and so so he was working on archie thunder so they went and talked to him i don't think at the time i don't think he was real keen on it you know hey that's that's my thing i don't you know but but they talked him into it and then they said you know you can collaborate if you want and and so so i started working down the path of revenge from mars we we had a you know the um almost every almost everybody in product development except for a small group of people that were working on cactus Canyon, almost everybody else was working on, on the pinball 2000 efforts. So there was lots of, yeah, it was all hands on deck. And it was, it was really cool from the standpoint that, um, you know, it was sort of the first at that, you know, now I've done it a bunch of times, but, but back then it was the first time when somebody said, you know, Hey, here's the keys to the car, man, have a good time, you know? And so, So I had a lot of, you know, I had a lot of control. I had a lot of ability to influence the vision, and I had a big resource group in all, you know, everybody in engineering with the exception of, like I said, a small team supporting cactus development was, you know, was at my disposal, right? So we just started, I mean, we daydreamed a lot. We invented new stuff, like, on a regular basis, right? I mean, there's so much cool stuff in that pinball 2000 right left of the two lock system for the front moldings. Yeah, we're literally sitting here looking at a revenge from Mars right now. And that was a big topic of conversation was the access for the location to be able to take the lockdown bar off, remove the glass and get a stuck ball out. But they're not have access to the money. My dad didn't even know about this game. You know, he got it new. He's operated it since then, except for the short period of time where we couldn't get buttons for it. But either way, that was back when parts were impossible to get for anything. But he didn't even know about it. And then I started doing research, and we were talking about it. I'm like, I wonder if these keys are in there. I looked, the keys are in there, and I showed him. He's like, I had no idea I could do that. And it's like, oh, interesting. So a lot of stuff like that, right? Like the connector header at the back to facilitate changing out playfields. Yeah, very quick change. The notion of going to decals on the cabinets. and just, I mean, the two-button, you know, flipper-button thing to add flexibility to future games. There was just so much that went into the development of it. There are some things that I think I screwed up, you know. Like I think that I made the whole notion of transporting the thing. I should have come up with a more clever system of to hinge the backbox. And and, you know, I really should have paid a lot more attention to that at the time. Like we were blinded by the notion that to American operators, they were never going to take the head off. They were just going to put the thing on their pickup truck and move it. Yep. That's what we do, but it's heavy and doesn't doesn't move. Nice. Yeah. At least we fold the heads down. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And but like but to the Europeans. Right. They didn't have you know, they don't have F-150s. Right. So they were trying to move. No, they were trying to move these things with a different kind. You know, it's much smaller vehicles and almost, you know, you know, you have to remember it's it's 1999. Right. It's not today. So they and so I think that that was an issue. So those are things that I think we could have done better. I mean, the sales on it were still impressive. I mean, they still had solid sales compared to what else was selling at that time. Oh, at the time. Yeah, it turned – I mean, everybody thinks pinball failed because pinball 2000 wasn't successful. That's hardly the case. I mean, I'll tell you exactly what that was about. It was a business thing that said, if it costs, I've got different things I can do with a certain amount of money. If I go into the pinball business, it was a viable business for anyone else, meaning that it wasn't a business that was losing money. It was a business that wasn't growing the way it used to, but it was a sustainable business. It could make X number of games a year, which Pinball in 2000 proved it could do. Absolutely. What the difference was that they looked at the dollars equation and they said, if I put the same amount of money into a slot machine business, the returns would be exponential. so so and and they were very open about it they they essentially told us that they said you know what i i could stay in this business i could be in this business but i you know i mean the castro and to his credit you know his job as a ceo is to to publicly held company it was to make profits for the stockholders it wasn't to like coddle the pinball division if and so he basically said you I'm going to take a flyer on two things that are growth opportunities for the business. One, the value of the video game division is much greater, and I'm going to spin them off into their own publicly held company, and I'm going to take what's left of the company and I'm going to point it at the slot machine business, and I'm going to blow that up. I'm going to do great there. And he was right, and he did. And so, you know, it's that. That's the real story as to why Williams is no longer in the pinball business. It's not. Everybody likes to say, you know, Pinball 2000 failed. I don't think Pinball 2000 failed. It was money. There's another thing that everybody seems to forget. We never pitched it. that we never pitched pinball 2000 as, as the sole product, these whole pinball product. Now the company didn't agree with us, but, but, but a lot of us that actually were there and, and we're on the floor saying, I know you've got to take one shot, but honestly, don't you need two lines? Don't you need a conventional line and a pinball 2000 line? And so we, you know, and, and we, you know, we, we, we said, hey, you know, like you got Cactus Canyon, that's a conventional product, and you got Pinball 2000 product. The two products can be complementary. Now, I got to tell you, the sales side of the house, they did not agree. They felt like make Pinball. They thought it was like an all-or-nothing thing. You're either doing Pinball 2000 or you're doing classic WPC. Yeah, you're either – that's right. You're either reinventing the pinball business or you're not. And so that's a tough place to be. I did my damnedest, and I think we all did. It absolutely shows. I mean, Revenge from Mars is an awesome game. Amazing game. I mean, the numbers on it, everything about it was good. Just unfortunately, gambling was the slot machines' one. It's a much shinier thing. People like stuff that pays out, I guess. Just the genesis of Revenge from Mars. Think about it. itself of, you know, the, the cheeky call outs. The call outs on this, that's a whole another. All the modes are great. Don't take my pickup truck. We had so much fun, you know, we had so much fun with it. It was that era, right? When you're, when you're working on something, that's not a license, right? You have so much freedom that, you know, you have so much creative freedom that you can do whatever you want. And so, and that's really, I mean, that's, that's really the story. And the story was, you know, we can make anything we want. So we did. It shows because it's so awesome. Yeah. Well, take us back to the expo that this debuted because there's been a ton of information of that. So they were all connected. Right. So we debuted it. Yeah, we debuted it. Well, we debuted it in London at the Natural History Museum in London. and um and and it was yeah it was it was crazy it was a black tie event you know um in right in the museum of natural history in london um and i remember uh these guys we had a really cool uh the video game side of the house had a really cool boat racing game called Hydro Thunder. Awesome game. Awesome, awesome game. And a guy named Steve Rank was the designer and the guy that drove and led that development effort. And I remember that at the London event, they had flown most, you know, a large portion of the Pinball 2000 development team, and they had flown all the Hydro Thunder guys out and everything. and Hydro Thunder is an amazing sit-down, you know. Oh, yeah, I know the game. It's a fun game for sure, absolutely. Well, it's amazing that you're talking about a lot of these video games, you know, Arctic Thunder, Hydro Thunder, Cruisin' USA, a lot of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Corbin and Zach's family can still attest to the fact that 20-plus years later, these games still earn on location. They're out there every day. I still have Exotica's, Cruisin' USA's. I still have Link's sets of those all over. Yeah, Cruisin' World. And they still earn. They earn just as good as any of the new stuff. I mean, oh, yeah. So, you know, I mean, the thing about it is that so we went to the show and Pinball 2000 just blew everybody's heads off to the point that like the Arctic Thunder guys were like getting no love. They were so disappointed and frustrated. They had worked their asses off. Their game was amazing. But Pinball 2000 was just so revolutionary to the world that people were just like – I mean, the crowds at the show, people were lined up 10 deep to get at the game. It was just crazy. I believe it, though. We had a crap load of them. And then even after all the cost cutting and saying it's your way or this way and you finally made it there. Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, it was great. Larry DeMar and I were doing switch out of playfield demos. We had this thing down to like three minutes. We could switch out of playfield. And I did it so many times. I did the demo so many times in London. And when I got home, I was like, my elbow was, you know, killing me. And I went to the doctor and he says, you've got tennis elbow. I got tennis elbow from like pinball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like from Yankin Yankin Playfields in London. Like, you know, whatever, eight demos a day or something. So it's funny that you're discussing these because the pinball 2000 website is still maintained, I believe, by Planetary. So all of the pictures of you demoing, like how all of this stuff works. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Are still out there. Yes, I'm looking at it right now. Well, that's real. That was like, you know, I had no idea. You had great hair then. Yes, as some balding men are sitting around this table, we are very jealous of your flowing locks. You know, hey, I can't take responsibility for my genetics, right? Uh-huh. But, yeah, so it's, it was a trip. It was, we did it again. Yeah, so you're excited, the crowds are excited, you know, the brass has to be excited about the reception. It was awesome. The the we did it again in Vegas, like, I don't know, a couple of months later for the whatever the fall, whatever the spring show was, you know, the coin off spring show was the American debut. The American debut was no different. It was like just incredible. People loved it. So, yeah, so, you know, I'd come off that, and I, the second game, the Star Wars game, I was less thrilled with. It was, Star Wars was, you know, it was before we had seen that second set of movies, right? Right. We didn't know, and we expected – the world expected them to be equally as impactful as the first set of movies. Was it still the idea back then you got a script for the movie or was that long gone by that point? It was released – is that still the same when they were releasing them around the same time as the movie? I'm not sure I understand the question. So like with T2, it was, you know, Steve and the crew would get, you know, go out to Hollywood and get an advanced copy of the script or something. Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. No, no. Yeah. We were there was that team was. Yeah, that team was locked up behind closed doors because of security reasons. They didn't have an advanced movie, but they had they had a lot of stuff. They had like, you know, they had imagery. They had, you know, they may have had a script. They had imagery. They had a lot of that kind of stuff. I had access. I had access to their area. So I remember. And, you know, John Papadude got the, you know, got the nod as you know, since we had bumped them off of the first game. and so he was working on it and honestly so my only issue with that game was that I felt that the way they treated the video broke the effect because they went they got they got video clips and they lost their minds with the video clips and the video clips They thought the video clips are so significant that they ran them edge to edge on the monitor Well, if you run a mesh edge on a monitor, the entire effect goes away. You know, you're just you're just like, right. You're just showing the screen, you know, might as well. Well, it just goes back to his original thing. I'm just staring at this big thing, you know. And, yeah, it has the interaction that I created relative to targets, but it really kind of broke the effect. And I went in and talked to those guys a lot about this, and they just ignored it. They wanted to do their own thing. They did their own thing. and so I remember I had a I had a bit of a falling out with Neil Nicastro because he was gushing about the game one day and I was so upset I couldn't stand with him to play it I was like you know what I I think I don't agree with you about this game so but you know and so they pulled the plug after the second game that you know right before that is the expo that you're talking about where I gave that speech, I had sort of inside knowledge that we weren't going to make it, you know. And the company had decided that they knew what they were doing. They knew they were going to close the pinball division, but they decided that they couldn't. They thought, man, Pinball Expo is so important to these guys. Let's let them have their weekend. Let's let them have their fun. And on Monday, we'll pull the plug. And that's what happened. That seems like a little bit of a reoccurring theme with Expo to where some of that has happened, you know, over time to time. It's so was this the expo, though, where they where you guys had them all connected, where all the the pinball 2000s were connected and they had a tournament on them? Because I've read about this tournament that where they had them all connected and then they had like essentially what what sounded like at the time. That's right. A leaderboard took a picture and you had a bar. Yeah, you would scan in and then it would show the leaders on that. That concept is basically what sounds to me like, I mean, Insider Connected and leaderboards and everything like that just back then. So I'll tell you that when I did Insider Connected, I was very driven by, you know, after they closed the pinball division, I was fortunate enough to get invited to work on the video game side by my friend Mark Trammell. and for the next nine years of my career I worked on PlayStation and Xbox video games and it was during that time in the early 2000s that when the Xbox launched that, you know, Xbox Live came to be and when, I don't know if you guys are, I'm hearing myself in my headphones. Did you guys change something? Everything still sounds good on our end. Okay. So, anyway, so the – where was I? Oh, yeah. So, I mean, I was – in Cider Connected, I was very motivated by creating basically a version of Xbox Live for pinball, taking what made sense in the way of things that fit the game and not taking things that didn't fit the game. And that's really the driving force. Now, of course, I was influenced by things like, hey, I knew that I had connected fast breaks. I had connected pinball 2000s. Right. I knew that I knew that, you know, you could do head to head play. You could do a tournament play. But but if you think about it, that's been done like a million times since then by the video game guys. Right. I mean, we play head to head online. So so Insider Connected was more driven by the experience I had in having to connect our video games in that era. And, you know, with Insider Connected, of course, you get all that stuff. You get leaderboards and you get achievements and you get tracking and stuff like that. The big hurdle when I was doing Insider Connected was how do I recognize that it's you standing in front of the game? Right. In other words, I need to understand that it's you specifically. It can't just be player one. Some kind of unique kind of some sort, yeah. That's right. That's right. And so I looked at a lot of – I looked at NFC. I looked at Bluetooth. I stumbled on QR codes because my girlfriend had an app where she could buy – she had a QR code. She could go up to the sandwich shop and pay for her sandwich. And I was like, hey, how's that work? And I got the app, and I was like, QR codes, man. This is it. This is what I've got to do. Part of the consideration also has to be that you need your operators and your distributors and everyone to embrace this technology and proliferate it. Yeah, well, I wanted to create a system that worked for everybody, right, not just end users but also operators. And the one thing that we've done with it that we envisioned, and I'm very happy that it's actually worked, is I can increase play at your location because I can drive people to your locations because if I run a quest on Godzilla and you don't own a Godzilla, you're going to go out and find a Godzilla, right, Which means I am physically driving people to play at your locations, right? When I say play any three connected Stern games or I say play this game on this day, well, if you don't have that game, play 007 on the 7th of December. You don't have that game. You're going out to find one to do it. And so we have – right now we've got real data that says, oh, yeah, I see increases earnings. It's been amazing what we've seen on the pop-up event side and launch parties and whatever else, how much new people who are to pinball and people who are casuals previously that love the special badges and the special achievements. And, oh, well, I've done 58 of the 59 things. How many days of Phil? Yeah, or we have people who have played a year plus consecutively. Their streaks are so important to them. When they're on vacation, they're leaving their code with somebody else to make sure they get it still. Yeah, it's intense. The coolest, and I know this sounds like hype, but the coolest stuff is yet to come. I mean, we're launching new stuff all the time, and we've got a set of cool features. And we've got features for everybody coming, right? So operators have embraced it. They've asked for things. We keep a running list of, you know, here's a bunch of operators on a forum talking about it. And I jump in there with them and say, you know, so what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And they've been vocal. So, you know, there's lots of great stuff coming relative to that stuff. And I can tell you a big part, and you guys are hearing it too, but we hear it on the distributor side is, you know, the home leader boards. And the concern I know I've heard a lot internally with you guys is, you know, the cost of maintaining those servers and everything else. What we're hearing from a lot of the homes is if you guys said, hey, five bucks a month, ten bucks a month or whatever. Yeah, it's not going to be much. Yeah. Way open to that. But people are people are hungry for that content for sure. And we're going to do it. And and honestly, it's not going to cost much. But we do have to. So think about this. Right. It's when we started out, we held it back for a couple of reasons. one we wanted to we wanted to we it was important for us to establish with operators that we could increase earnings with the system and we were trying to give them a thing that was unique to them to help out and and and that was leaderboards and a huge you know huge success there right so um the other thing that we we were concerned about security we there's a bunch of um not only a bunch of security issues but also a lot of privacy issues that have to be dealt with and so you know are you aware of the situation of the gentleman who'd had his his qr code tattooed onto his arm and then posted a picture and people were scanning him in everywhere so yeah there's definitely fun yeah little things yeah all of that that you don't even think of no so we so uh we spent a lot of money with our very expensive law firm to sort of understand the environment, right? So one of the things that, and the other functional issue with home leaderboards is that I see is growing at a rate that none of you would believe, right? If I showed you the numbers, which I can't, you wouldn't believe me. You'd go like, there's no way. And, you know, no, So there's no way. So when we extrapolate that growth and we say, all right, so imagine, you know, I don't know, take a flyer. Imagine that 5% of these people put home-leaded boards up. What's my server cost? Absolutely. Right? So you go, so that's all that drives it. We're not looking, you know, honestly, when we do roll it out, there's going to be some small fee related to it. And it's not going to be anything that we're going to get rich on. That's not the business we're in. And we're not, you know, I've said it a million times, people don't believe me, but we're not going down the path of nickel and diming you to death with Insider Connected. It's just not – I mean I'd have to have an audience the size of the Xbox audience for any of that to make sense, and we're just not there. Well, I can tell you what Insider Connect is doing is a big part of what the four of us sitting at this table are into, and that's growing pinball. So those achievements, those locations, pushing people to certain games and to get excited, it's just another tool in our toolbox. That's the name of our game. Yeah, is to grow this because that's why it's working. Yeah, we want to stay away from those, you know, historic valleys to where, oh, my gosh, pinball is going away. We want to keep, you know, on this trajectory that you guys fortunately have put everyone. We're with you and we're with you. We are all about increasing gameplay right now. As a matter of fact, I, you know, I get I get I get a series of personal goals from the company every quarter. and one of my goals every quarter for the last three quarters has been, there's actually a metric I have to increase play by X and it's tracked. And so my success to some extent is predicated on my ability to be able to deliver on that. That's why you see the activity that you see from things like, you know, Questapalooza and, you know, here we just released a bunch of spring quests and we've got a bunch of game-dedicated things coming. And so that's all about because, like, hey, if I don't increase play, and it's a tool for me to increase play. When I increase play, we are expanding pinball. We are exposing new people to pinball. We're growing the community. It's good for everybody. It's good for operators. It's even good for my competitors. You know, when I do these things, that's right. That's right. So, so, you know, everybody should be pulling for me to hit my goals. We all are. We absolutely are. Seriously, it's like people don't, people don't realize it, but that's the, and you know, I don't know how much I've verbalized that that is a thing that that's a metric. like we all you know everybody has bosses everybody has jobs to do um i have performance metrics every year uh related to my work and and and one of my performance metrics uh like i said for you know the past three or four quarters has been increased gameplay and there's a number associated to it and it's a number that is tracked it's not like a bullshit number like you know, I increased play because look at all these people at lunch parties. No, no, no. They're sick. There's like, I know how often people are playing. I know what they're playing. I know how they're playing. So there's, there's like, I either made it or I didn't make it. Right. Oh, absolutely. Well, you've been absolutely incredibly generous with your time. We have a couple of questions that we're probably going to queue up on here, but the one that I had to end it for me was I'd seen recently that, you know, you've been involved on the video game side, the pinball side, and all of that, and that you'd had a new inbox, like some sort of helicopter game that you'd released into the wild at Logan. So is Pinball 2000 one of those ones that you have, like you have your own version at home, or, you know, where does that come from? I have my own version. Yeah, I'm staring at it right now. I have a Pinball 2000, Revenge from Mars. All my games I get a copy of. So, yeah, I have one right here. I'm looking at it. Have you kept all your games that you've gotten? Do you have them all? Almost, almost. I don't have. Early in my career, you know, early in my career when I worked on things like Toronto and Spy Hunter. I don't have those games because I was too, I was too junior to demand that I got, that I get one. And, and I was, I was also, I was also not compensated at a point where I could afford to buy one. So I never did. You don't have your own Toronto environmental set up at your house. That's not taking up a bunch of space for you. I wish I could tell you I did, but I don't know. And, and so, but yeah, The Hawk Avenger, you're referring to. The Hawk Avenger is a helicopter novelty game that I did for Lorne Bromley in, I want to say, the late 80s. And this is before my time in pinball. So I had been a toy inventor already. And I was doing, after my days as a toy inventor, my career, I started at Midway Games in 1978. and I worked on coin operator video games for about seven years. And then in 84, when the business tanked, I thought I was going to get laid off, so I went and found a job. I don't know that I would have gotten laid off, but I just didn't want to take the chance. So I went and found a job at Marvin Glass and Associates as a toy inventor, and I was a toy inventor for about five years. And that company broke up in, like, 1988. and when I left that company, I was on my own for a little while and eventually I hooked up with a small little coin-out manufacturer called Grand Products. Grand Products was basically made up of the old Midway executive team from when I was there, Dave Moravsky, Stan Jurocki, and those guys. And they had work and I was looking for work and they started throwing stuff at me. And eventually I went to work for them. And it was during that time Bromley was one of their clients. They would manufacture the Bromley product. And so Lauren Bromley and her father wanted to build a helicopter game like the old Midway helicopter games, like Whirlybird and those kind of games. And so I basically reprised it. You know, I made my own version. and that's what you see on that. And it was during that time, you know, it was after the first Gulf War, so Gulf Wars were still popular. And so it's themed, you know, it's all themed out like a military helicopter thing in the desert. So, yeah, that's the game you saw. I have worked on, you know, I'm blessed. I have worked on so many different kinds of games. I have a question for you. I have a question, George. Yeah, yep. Of all the things that you've done in your career, whether it be video games, pinball, toys, what was your favorite project to ever work on? Wow, you're asking him to name his favorite child car? No, just the most enjoyable. It wasn't work. It was passion. You know what? It's impossible to tell you. I can tell you highlights. I can tell you ones that stick in my mind as, look, I have a, I mean, my portfolio is, I'm so blessed. Yes. I'm blessed to have the portfolio I have, right? And I've been, I'm happy that I've been able to execute on all these different, you know, all these different mediums with all these different people. and so I you know, look I love my Monster Bash, I would never let that go I love my Deadpool, I would never let that go I have toys from my toy days, I have you know, I have novelty games that Hawk Avenger, if not for the fact that it's enormous I might have kept it forever but you know, it's just sort of like, it just felt like where am I going to set this thing up and what am I going to, you know So it just occurred to me, I think I'm better off, you know, with people enjoying it over at Zesty's place. And so I'm thrilled. People send me pictures of them playing this game. Hey, I'm playing your game. And so that's joy. That has to be so gratifying. It is. It is. And I'll tell you what, games like that were hard. I was a one-man. I was damn near a one-man show. I mean, a guy named Vito Caparusa helped me with the code. My old friend Tom Caparosa helped me with some of the mechanics. But honestly, I was such a one-man show for that game. Kevin O'Connor did the production art, but I did the original art concept, you know, that he put into production. I mean, I did everything. I sculpted that helicopter. Oh, geez. I built that play field by hand. I mean, it's just, I got those, you know, a lot of those, like that tank mech, I made that work. It was just just so many things. And it's definitely something like that. Sometimes these projects are more satisfying, not always just because of how successful or how many units you sell. But, you know, the relationships and the impact that it had on your career overall, that's that's really cool to hear. Yeah, there's no question. And, you know, you talk about the impact on my career. Do you know it was that helicopter game that brought me to light at Williams? Because she had that at a coin-op trade show, and when the Williams guys were doing their after-show recap of what they saw, a bunch of the designers mentioned the helicopter game. And Pat Lawler said, I know the guy that did that. I used to work with him at Midway. And so, honestly, so it's like you say, you know, one of my favorite quotations, sometimes it's attributed to the philosopher Goethe, and I don't know how true this is, but the quotation is, endeavor and providence will provide. and and i gotta tell you i've lived by that and i and i believe in that i think you do things and sometimes sometimes even the things you're doing they don't make a lot of sense to the you know economies of your life or whatever but if you have a passion for this thing and you believe in it you do this thing and think good things come from it just from the just from the act of doing you You know, like creating this thing, making it. Amen. Stuff happens that, you know, you can't always see it. You can't always predict it. You just have to, like, I'll tell you that I work just as hard on the ones you guys love as on the ones you guys hate. You know? So it's like, you know, I don't go half speed. if you don't like one of my things, which is absolutely normal, it's not because I didn't put myself into it. You know, it's just the way it is, right? When we first did... Seriously, what's interesting to me about the modern part of your career, obviously, with pinball design is several of your games, you know, Deadpool and James Bond more recently, those games come out and, you know, the Pinside Terrorists are out there, saying it's the worst thing ever, and then six, eight months later, it's like, well, now Deadpool's heralded as a top five game of all time and everything else. James Bond is quickly approaching it. Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, we don't do it for the naysayers. We do it because we love it, and we do it with the hopes that there's at least one person out there that's going to enjoy it. Yeah, and honestly, and I don't mean this in an arrogant way, but I don't You know, it's hard for me to watch people judge something they don't understand. So I think that when you, you know, if you're going to be that quick to judge, then you had better had immersed yourself in the thing. Absolutely. Because there's a lot of, you know, a lot of sharpshooting, and, man, people haven't even touched it. You know, they're just looking at it. No. So, and that happens not just to me, that happens to all my, you know, all the guys that, look, the, I, you know, I run the studio and all these young guys are coming up in the studio and I'm trying to, I try to mentor and enable and let them be who they are. and I always tell them, do what you feel, and don't worry about this noise, because it's just, at the end of the day, it's just noise, and a lot of it comes around, right, a lot of it, it's like, you know, they hate it, hate it, they hate it, they love it, they love it, they love it, right, you know, right, so, yeah, I mean, that's my, at least you don't have to live the life of a lot of other artists where you're not appreciated until after you've passed on at least you're being appreciated now that's an upside yeah that's true yeah there's definitely there's something there um but i know everyone's sitting around this table we love and appreciate you know everything that you've done your ins and your outs and it's i mean it's a just an incredible thrill for us to be able to you know sit here and even just listen to these stories i know we're all just as you're talking, nodding to each other and, you know, smiles ear to ear. So you to take this time today to talk to us and, you know, anyone that might be listening, we really do. Apparently people listen to us sometimes. I don't believe it. Well, you know, I'm happy to do it. I, I hope people enjoy it when they listen to it. I, and I hope that they get more insight into, you know, some of the thinking that goes behind some of these things and some of the reasons that things get done and stuff. Right. It's, uh, um, yeah. We'll put you on the calendar to talk to you every two weeks. So we'll just have a standing schedule where we're just, well let see when when did you guys first reach out to me It only taken us three months to get together We eventually figured it out But again I mean you being this generous with your time is definitely greatly appreciated by us in the community I can't tell you enough how crazy my schedule is. You know, I mean, I just I love it. You know, don't get me wrong. I really love it. Well, I know in the social media scene you're super active, and I know that people in the community appreciate whenever you chime in on something and say, hey, this is definitively how this is supposed to be. And then everyone's like, oh, well, George said that's how it's supposed to be, so we're good to go. I try. I try. I can't be everywhere. And also there's a lot of things that I can't jump into. um you know they're just like if you know some guys you know some guy says something you know like you know i don't know spike two is archaic you know and whatever and i can't jump into that right i i gotta i i can't i can't engage right i like to say i have to say look so if i told you the number of spike two games that are working in the world uh you know you you'd like you'd fall out of your chair so there's always that one guy you can't engage the terrorist never engage with a terrorist no no you just feel like i'm like i'm like you know you're like okay i'm saying i'm i mean i mean i want to jump in there and say oh i'm sure say dude that's what they want george don't negotiate with the terrorists let me see your pinball system oh you don't have one uh be quiet let me let me help you understand let me help you understand the situation right it's like I just saw there's a great thread on the Insider Operators thing where these guys, like, to a man, they're, like, up there going, yeah, dude, my Spike 2 game's out, I earned everything. I was like, wow, this is fantastic. I don't even have to jump in here and say, yeah, I've known this for a while. You guys are talking about it. Okay, it's good. Well, this has been absolutely fantastic. again we can't be more appreciative of the time and maybe if we come up with another interesting topic later on we can have you back on sorry I bombarded you with the list of questions I did I spent so much time thinking about it and trying to shorten my list and then I was like and a lot of times when a guy's writing something and it's going to go to print I absolutely tell them you have to send me the questions in print and I have to sit down and answer these questions because I don't want a conversation to fall through the cracks. I don't want something to be misinterpreted or anything like that. So when it's going to print, I insist that you send me the questions and I will sit down. I will write. If I have to write you three paragraphs to explain this to you, I don't mind doing it, but I'm going to get it right. yeah in this format you know you've heard me say the words you know people have heard me say the words so it's kind of like you can still misinterpret what I said and you can whatever but it's different right than a translation I like this we have your voice now so we'll run it through some AI and we'll make you say all kinds of crazy things about the next game that's coming and who the designer is Bob's leather pants Right. It's just just a matter of time. Just a matter of time. It's like I'm loving I was like, I'm loving these. Like I see this service like we're for sale. And then I look at the number that they think we're they I look at the number that they think we're for sale for. And I'm thinking, oh, man, it's like you read something about how you value businesses. businesses right you know like we couldn't possibly we couldn't possibly sell our business for that price nobody you know it's like that is such a low price relative to the value of our business that you that's insane you know that would be like giving away the business just take it come and take it we've got to educate them on multiples yeah simple math yeah unbelievable you It was like, I said, that's just, it was like, I'm like, I'm like, okay, so just how did you arrive at that number? I mean, it's like, do you think, divide that number by five. You think that's what our company makes over here? You know, it's like, cause, cause dude, you know, it's like this guy was so far off. It's not even funny. It's wild. People love to stir the pot for sure. They do. I got a question for you. Back to Pinball 3000. Where do you think it would be today if Williams didn't close up on it and everything, if it kept going, where do you think it would have went to? I like to envision that things evolve and that you don't ever get it right the first time. And so I would have liked to envision that it would have evolved, gotten easier to use, more powerful, etc. We could have figured out, you know, maybe multiple monitor orientations and things so that you could get more flexibility in where you place target, you know, the interaction. Some more modern, you know, visual projection techniques and stuff like that. So I think, you know, I like to envision that it would have evolved. I don't know for a fact that it would have, but, you know, it might have been a thing that people would lose interest and would run its course. But I don't, you know, I don't know. I think it's funny that I still see people, like, messing around with the integration of the two things, right? Like, you know, I see people putting monitors down on the play field and I see sensing technology for the ball relative to the video display and stuff like that. So I see people fascinated with the concept of the transforming pinball machine. There are, you know, to date, I think all of them, including, you know, Pinball 2000 as we know it, you know, there are compromises. And so I think that, you know, it's like to envision that it would have been one of a line or, you know, a type of product line as opposed to the definitive solution to pinball. Well, I think speaking for everyone around this table, one of the things that you've been involved with or in the past that we'd love to see reintegrated and to come back, especially with Insider Connected, is Midnight Madness. We are obsessed with it. We love it. Corbin and his family. Yeah, that's that's very much Dwight Sullivan. And we cornered him at Expo this year. We cornered him and we questioned him about it because that's what everyone we talk. Yes, we talk to who else do we John Borg. We talk to Borg. Yeah, he's like, no, talk to Dwight. He's like, talk to Dwight. That's who you got to talk to. Yeah. Yeah. Dwight. Dwight loves and he invented it. and Dwight. And so, yeah. But, I mean, you're going to see, with the power of IC, you're about to see some really cool things that are along that vein, if you will. Okay. I like what we're hearing. I'm intrigued. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's actually coming very soon. Might even be with the next game. Ooh. A little tease here for the people. I like it. a taste. All four listeners. Well, thanks a lot, guys. Thank you very much for the time. Again, you've been very, very gracious and we appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. We can't do it on a regular basis, but from time to time, I have no issue jumping back in, okay? Greatly appreciate that. But the next time we have something, we will definitely reach out and get back together. So thank you so much. Sounds great. Have a good one, guys. You too. Bye. Bye. We're semi-fresh at this point. Oh, man. We're slightly stale at this point. We have some blown minds over here. So in case you guys didn't notice, we just had a caller. real top cast style and uh it was the one and the only george gomez george gomez double g man listening back to this one is going to be a real treat for me just picking up on all the little things that i'm sure that i missed our little action after action talk here for a second yeah absolutely well it was amazing yeah yeah i feel like we could have just went all night george gomez goes all night i was tempted to let him i just didn't know if we had enough beer i mean I didn't know if we had enough room on the memory card. That too. Can we switch memory cards real quick? Eventually, we have to put a cap on it. What an experience, though. Absolutely top of the mountain for us. Again, thank you, Mr. Gomez, for taking the time. So now my second... I like how we think him like he's going to be listening to this. He might. You never know. We should send him a copy. My second favorite Gomez memory now is when he was working on that Bond at Expo two years ago. That's my second. It was my first favorite. I mean, it's still up there. It's still up there. It was the initial experience with him for me. But this was like, it was very surreal. Very much. I mean, we were all just looking at each other with blown minds, smiling ear to ear. And by this point, you've all heard the whole interview. So, you know. And once again, we're not adding anything. Just so everybody knows, this is exactly how it went down. Exactly how it was received. Yeah. So we were talking, I guess you want to finish up anything else? What were we talking about? So we were in mid-fact check so we can finish those up, and then we can wrap this episode up and get it out there for the people. But fact check here, Arcade Super Awesome, Kyle and I had talked about that, and I had said that they had left Sideswipe Brewing when that had changed ownership, and now the majority of their games are at Hoof Hearted. Hoof Hearted. You say it fast enough. I was like, Hoof Hearted. Yeah, I know. I told somebody the other day, like, who farted brewery? I'm like, yeah, that one. Close enough. In Marengo, Ohio. And then they have a ton of pinball machines at Heart State Brewing as well. So if you're in the Columbus metropolitan area. Where in Heart State? I saw them post that, and I was like, I don't know if I've been to that one. I've not been to it either. It's on my list to visit. I know I've had a beer or two from there, but I've never been there. And then Corbin and I had had the argument of, is it Micro or Mirko? Turns out it is, in fact, Mirko. There is no micro that makes playfields. I think you had micro and I had Mirko. Heart State is saying Columbus, Ohio. Yeah, Columbus. So definitely if you're in that area or you're visiting, check it out. My phone's charged. I can look it up. So it was pointed out to me that at the 55-minute mark of the previous episode, Corbin whispers into the microphone, Grinch style, hate, hate, hate. So apparently people listen to this a lot more closely than I do. Wait, somebody said they heard me say that? Yeah, I don't know what I said or what the conversation was. But someone must have said the word hate, and in the background they hear you go, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, grinch style. Or it was supposed to be like De Chappelle's, like, the play-a-hater club. Ball, the play-a-hater ball. Hey, hey, hey. I guarantee it was a Chappelle reference. It had to be Chappelle. Anyway, so just know that no matter how quietly you're saying something into the microphone, we apparently have listeners out there who are isolating just the Corbin track and listening to that section. Jeff, are listeners going to be quite sober this episode? They are. They are. It's going to be a totally different sort of experience. So during the – Ponder short. Yeah. I think I've said absolutely at least a few times. You did for sure to respond first. A couple. Yeah. But not as many as – I said it for you. I know it doesn't count. It's just a capper when someone says something that you totally agree with. Just say, absolutely. Absolutely. They can feel the full, like, yes. There's nothing more I can add to this. Shout out to Keith for not being real loud when he came in today. Thank you, buddy. Ziggy was the loud one, as always. So when we were talking about TPF on the previous episode, I couldn't remember the name of the really cool booth that had, like, the labyrinth theme, and it was Lord of the Game Room. So shout out to Lord of the Game Room. Your booth at TPF was the blue ribbon. Hit the sounder, Kyle. There it is. But they had really cool mods for Alien, Labyrinth, Godzilla, Jaws, and Cactus Canyon, as well as having all of those games in their booth. So I wanted to be sure to shout them out. They had some cool stuff, for sure, that you should check out. What are we missing on Cactus? I mean, I feel like we got a lot already. They had a lot of stuff that you can add, like all kinds of additional rocks and saloon doors or something. They don't have the real door kit, though. No, not the real door kit. Yeah, that's what I'm waiting for. I guess I don't know how long I'm going to wait. You're going to be waiting, sir. Also, when George was talking about just going in and showing, I ran and I had to go show Lyman. Oh, my God. Sorry, not to go back to that. He wasn't a name dropper. I was just remembering moments. Oh, name dropping left and right. Yeah. Because, you know, with Pat Dollar, Lyman Sheets, and Steve Ritchie. Because he's lived the dream. The dream. He's hanging out with all these guys. He's a full rock star we were just talking to. He probably could text any of those guys. Yeah. You know, he probably texts. Do you think Steve Ritchie, if he texts people, it's all in caps? I'm at your house. I'll be there by six. Dinner at seven. If Steve Ritchie ever texts me, I'm going to interrupt. Eight. Anyway, sorry. Back to what we were talking about. Steve Ritchie, if you are listening, email us at freshfimball.gmail.com. Just call me. Just text me. come in for a chat. Well, I've heard rumors that possibly Mark Ritchie might be at Pinbrew this weekend. We should definitely bring the equipment out with us. He was there last year, wasn't he? He was. Mark Ritchie is just as good. I would be just as excited to see Mark Ritchie so I have it down here. Plus, Paul Pichin. That's what I've heard. I don't think we need to take any. We're not changing the lineup now. But we have the trailer in the bus. I would just want to, even if he had five minutes and just talked about his time at Capcom where he wasn't allowed to do anything, I would love to give that a try. So I smoked cigarettes and then designed a game that never released. I'm ready for that. Yeah, absolutely. That might be what happens at like 9 a.m. at Pembroke. I don't know. People might be like hanging out just talking. I know. There are going to be some opportunities. So then the final item I had for the fact check was for the Turner Pinball Ninja Eclipse. I quoted the MSRP as $6,995. It's 94, isn't it? Oh, that changes the deal. Fucking get one coming. $6,994. That must be a weird-ass reference that we're not getting. So he had explained it at TPF of that they wanted to have the lowest price entry-level game, and that was dropping it a dollar down. So it's not $69.95. There it is. Okay. So those are all the fact checks I have. I don't remember during the beginning portion how much we talked about Pin Brew, but this weekend, which is going to be Thursday the 4th, Friday the 5th, and Saturday the 6th, we'll be in Girard, Ohio for Pin Brew Fest. We'll be representing our good friends in Benton, Wisconsin, Spooky Pinball. We're going to have an insane collection of their games. We've talked about this so much. It's going to be awesome. All I've been doing is just been driving around, like wrangling up these games. That's all Corbin, Kyle, and I have been doing is just getting these games all ready. It's definitely been a little bigger endeavor than what I first envisioned it to be. Well, we started out at what, like six games? And we're up to 17? I thought we were just taking like Looney Tunes. Yeah, now we're taking 17 games. The original conversation was Looney Tunes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Dad today was like, you think anybody's taking any EMs out there? You want to take this pal's garden? I'm like, I can take it if you want, man. Why don't you bring it and get your free ticket? There we go. So that's where we'll be. We're also representing American Pinball. So we will have Barry O's Barbecue Challenge Limited Edition. Number six. Number six. What else do we have? Valhalla. We'll also have Legends of Valhalla. Classic. You can take that home with you. You can. That'll be available. Just Valhalla. Frankenstein for sale. Frankenstein. Yeah, all of that fun stuff. Did you pick GTF up? It went straight out there. It's going straight out there. Oh, good. Galactic Tank Force Limited Edition, a brand new in-box, and that'll be... Ooh, I should bring balls for that probably. Yeah, I have a box already packed up. Oh, do you have some? I do. Okay. I was fully prepared for that. Cool, cool, cool. And then we'll have a plethora of used games. We actually already sold a game last night, so shout out. Swords of Fury is already spoken for. That's going to be getting picked up this weekend, but we'll also have Jurassic Park available, Frankenstein available, possibly Tales from the Crypt. That's 50-50 at this point. A Venom Pro and Premium. Venom Pro and Premium. We can do show games on those where there are displays, or we also have New in Box available, also with Stranger Things Pro and Premium. Let us know and we can get you hooked up. You can pick them up, we can save them on shipping, we can work a deal out. Absolutely. Come talk to us. Come bend Kyle's ear as he'll be spending a lot of time at the booth. because I experienced in his basement today what everyone at Pinbrew will be seeing with Rob Zombie, and I will tell you what. You folks are in for a treat. Drop your dollar donation for charity into the bucket and go in there. What is the charity? Yeah, I was just about to ask. So we'll have full details on the charity there, but essentially a community member, John Anderson, lost a daughter this year to childhood. It was a form of cancer, leukemia, and it's for her foundation. It's a very long thing. Yeah, we'll have full details at Pin Brew, but it's for her foundation. A good cause. The best cause is children should never have to suffer through life-altering events like that. But hopefully this foundation and these donations will make it to where there's less suffering. But it is the Allie Anderson. Alve. The Allie Anderson. We're not laughing at the thing. Even know how to. We're not laughing. It's very serious. Alvore Rapidama Skarmacoma Research Fund. Yes. But we'll post this to social media. That way everyone who's not able to attend but still wants to donate to Allie Anderson's research fund can get those donations in. But we're not charging for a game just for fun. It's to go to charity and for people to get the full experience. Throw a buck or two in there. If you want to make a serious donation, obviously, those are welcomed as well. But before we sign off here, Corbin, any last little takeaways from the George Gomez interview? I know we're still all kind of processing. I had a thought a second ago, but I totally lost it. I mean, I'm just appreciative. This is wild. It's just wild times. A big takeaway for me for sure was that he never envisioned as Pinball 2000 to be the savior of pinball, that he always thought there should be traditional pinball as well as other options. I thought that was cool. I also thought it was interesting, though, that like it came – he said that it wasn't necessarily viewed as a failure and that it was still a profitable business for Allie Williams to do. It just was that there was slot machines. There was exponentially more profitable businesses that they were like, you know, we put the same time and energy into the slot machines. The payback is way better. And so it wasn't necessarily – It still puts it in perspective too of like Spooky or CGC or somebody that's only creating pinball machines in our current environment. It is a much – I mean even Stern is solely – Yes. All the companies – I mean I guess American is owned by companies that have divisions of other – Chicago Gaming Company would be the – They'd be the closest. They're a better example of what it was for Bally Williams back in the day when they have these other divisions. And if you look at it, I mean, they built Chicago. I mean, we're going to unbox the Chicago Gaming tonight, but it is one of the best built games. Yep. But they don't put the emphasis, the effort, or not the effort. It's just not. The priority isn't put towards the pinball versus like the big games, the arcade games that they make that make them the big bucks. The arcade games, the slot machines, everything else. they have different priorities. It's their priorities. I thought that was interesting because I do feel like so much of the narrative towards the end of the 90s or the death of Pinball or however you want to phrase it is that it was becoming, it was like they were losing so much money on it and all this stuff. Yeah, that's what you always hear. I feel like that's always the narrative you hear. I found it very interesting that George kind of... But no, it's freaking politics and more money here. They were like, there's more money here so that's what we're doing. And so I just thought that was very interesting. They could have kept a small division together and made X amount and still been profitable. Yeah, because I've heard other podcasts and read other things to where Williams did want to sell off just the pinball division. And essentially, I don't know if the asking price was too high or what the climate was at that time, but wasn't able to happen. So they closed the doors and moved on to other things. And thankfully, yeah, that's business. Thankfully, Gary Stern kept things on life support, and we are where we are now because so many other things would have just went to the wayside and would have been gone in a thing of the past. Extinct. Yeah. I mean, that's scary for sure. Final thoughts, Kyle? I know. I can't even think anymore. It's a lot to process. Yeah, it is. And hope to see everybody at Pinbrew. Yeah. If you're able, again, I think we've talked about it before. Thank you, George Cosmas. I mean, come on, man. What a guy to come on. And not only just like what a real, like he's just a, he's just like a real pinball guy. Like a pinball dude. Just like an enthusiast. Enthusiast and just as excited, a hobby, you know, just excited about all of it as we are. Just like us sitting around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like it would, it'd be cool if we had like a lot, if he was here live. But we're not going to push our luck. We'll get there. We'll get there. I honestly think that that could be a potential thing for Expo or future shows. I mean, if we would have all been at TPF, I have no doubt that we could have gotten some time with him to sit down. And he's just that kind of dude. And he's just a real he's still on that. He's really a real level. Yeah, absolutely. Final thoughts, Zach. Not really. It was amazing. Thanks, George. And I hope to see everybody at Pembroke. If you see the bus, we'll be on the green bus parking at different times. Yeah, not the whole time. But now find us, find our booth, find the bus. Kyle, if you want to play us out with some. What a night. Mad Pinball jingle, but reach out to... Time to go on box and move some more games around. Feel free to reach out to jeff at madpinball.com or corbin at madpinball.com and we can get you hooked up with whatever sort of pinball madness you need. Get out there and play some more pinball, folks. Mad Pinball. Good night. Fresh Pinball. Top of spots ain't got a fault. Call 1-800-MAN-PIN-PAUL. Eight four words that rhyme with all. Need a pen, call MAN-PIN-PAUL. you