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The Early Years at Data East & Sega Pinball - Pinball Expo 2025 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2025)·video·1h 31m·analyzed·Oct 17, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Gary Stern & Joe Balzer's Data East Pinball origin story: bootstrap startup to industry survivor.

Summary

Gary Stern and Joe Balzer recount the founding and early years of Data East Pinball (1986-1999), covering the company's bootstrap origins, first game Laser War, early licensed titles (RoboCop, Monday Night Football, Playboy), manufacturing challenges, and legal battles with Williams. The discussion highlights how Data East became the longest continuously running pinball company and introduced key innovations like solid-state flipper protection.

Key Claims

  • Stern Pinball is the longest contiguously running pinball company in the world

    high confidence · Gary Stern, opening remarks at Pinball Expo 2025

  • Data East Pinball was founded in 1986, first game released in 1987, company sold to Sega in 1994, operations continued through 1999

    high confidence · Gary Stern, providing timeline of company history

  • The Data East electrical engineer redesigned the system which was partially reverse-engineered from a Williams system

    high confidence · Joe Balzer describing technical development with Japanese engineer

  • Data East developed the first solid-state flipper protection system that prevented flipper coil burnout

    high confidence · Gary Stern discussing flipper innovations and patent 'Typhaisy 2006'

  • Williams distributors were not allowed to carry Data East games due to Williams' market strength

    high confidence · Gary Stern describing competitive challenges from Williams

  • RoboCop (1989) was the first licensed title from Data East Pinball, obtained through parent company's existing arcade/home software licenses

    high confidence · Joe Balzer explaining RoboCop licensing origin

  • Williams sued Data East over patent infringement including auto-percentaging and false advertising claims

    high confidence · Gary Stern describing legal disputes with Williams

  • Williams did not own the trademark 'Multiball' but only owned the specific font used on Firepower

    high confidence · Gary Stern clarifying Multiball trademark dispute with Williams

Notable Quotes

  • “every force in the world was against us succeeding... he was right but here we are”

    Gary Stern @ Opening segment — Reflects the skepticism and obstacles Data East faced at founding

  • “my children will never go to college i will never be able to afford college”

    Gary Stern @ New Orleans Convention Center steps, night before Laser War trade show — Illustrates the existential pressure and stakes during the company's critical early moment

  • “take your fucking flipper and shove it”

    [name withheld pending review] @ When naming flipper patent Typhaisy 2006 — Origin story of the playful acronym for flipper coil protection patent

  • “Williams did not own the name Multiball... They just owned the font that was used on Firepower”

    Gary Stern @ Legal battles discussion — Clarifies a common misconception about Williams' IP protection and how Data East navigated it

  • “I'm not an EE. I'm a lawyer. And like a light bulb went on because he thought I was the dumbest EE he ever met.”

    Joe Balzer @ Discussion of Japanese electrical engineer — Humorous illustration of the communication and expertise gaps in early company

Entities

Gary SternpersonJoe BalzerpersonOrin DaypersonData East PinballcompanyStern PinballcompanySegacompanyWilliams ElectronicscompanyGottliebcompanyBallycompany

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Detailed recounting of Data East Pinball's bootstrap founding in 1986 from a basement startup to production company, establishing the historical narrative of how a modern pinball manufacturer emerged

    high · Comprehensive timeline from townhouse basement through Rego Building facility, first trade show in New Orleans (1987), and progression to Sega acquisition (1994)

  • ?

    design_innovation: Data East pioneered solid-state flipper protection technology (Typhaisy 2006 patent) that prevented flipper coil burnout, a major innovation addressing a chronic industry problem

    high · Gary Stern's detailed explanation of flipper failure modes, Williams' parallel-wound coil response, and Data East's solid-state timing solution that became industry standard

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Data East acquired a vintage Gottlieb four-poster press ($9,000) that remains in active use at Stern Pinball factory over 35+ years later

    high · Joe Balzer noting the press came from machinery dealer, had been at Gottlieb for prior period, and is still operational alongside newer equipment

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Extended patent litigation between Williams and Data East covering multiple claims (auto-percentaging, false advertising, design patents), with Williams eventually unable to prevent Data East's use of 'Multiball' name (only owned the Firepower font)

    high · Gary Stern's detailed account of multiple lawsuits, personal depositions, the Typhaisy flipper patent, and clarification that Williams' trademark claims were font-specific, not name-specific

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.276

0:00
Hey guys. I'm going to let Oren Day, who used to be part of Daddy's Pinball, he's going to actually moderate. Gary is on the way. He called to tell me that there is – he was supposed to meet us for lunch. Hence, his lunch is right here, so he'll probably come in a little hungry. They had some traffic on the highway. There was an accident, so he is slightly delayed. I want to start by saying something I never thought I would say in public about our pinball company.
0:40
Stern Pinball, Daddy East Pinball, Stern Pinball, is the longest contiguously running pinball company in the world. there's gary now on cue hi gary we're just talking about how we're the longest running pinball company in the world i never would have imagined that when we started that company because man every force in the world was against us succeeding hi we don't need another pinball company he was right but here we are Okay.
1:25
Okay. Gary, your lunch is right here. Okay. I've got to get official here. I've got to get a shirt on, extra large. Okay. I'm going to change. They're going to change. Everybody watch. They're going to change. Thank you all for coming to listen to us.
1:44
It was, I don't know if you've done any of this yet. I've done nothing. It was Monish and I, Lila Zepp.
Namco
company
Ed Pellegriniperson
Shelly Sachsperson
Barry Ourslerperson
Bob Lloydperson
Don Thorneperson
Jim Rossperson
Eddie Spearsperson
Hugh Hefnerperson
Laser Wargame
RoboCopgame
Monday Night Footballgame
Playboygame
Rob Wrathperson

licensing_signal: Data East Pinball obtained major licenses (RoboCop, likely others) through parent company's existing arcade and home software business units, creating strategic IP advantages

high · Joe Balzer explaining RoboCop came from Data East's home software and arcade division already holding the license; contrast with failed Adam's Family deal through Orion

  • ?

    industry_signal: Williams used market dominance to exclude Data East from distributor networks, preventing authorized distributors from carrying Data East games

    high · Gary Stern's statement: 'Williams distributors were not allowed to buy our games. And they could do that in those days because they were that strong'

  • ?

    business_signal: Data East Japan (parent) held 20% stake in Namco-affiliated structures; Japanese management sent engineers and caretakers to oversee US operations; complex interlocking directorates typical of Japanese corporate structure

    medium · Discussion of Fakuda, JAMA board, Nakamura's mistress scandal, Sega's eventual 20% stake in Data East Japan (not US pinball division), and Japanese engineer/caretaker visits

  • $

    market_signal: By late 1990s, 70%+ of pinball games sold went to home collectors rather than operators; Playboy was noted as unsuitable for home market, marking shift in business model from operator-focused to collector-focused

    high · Gary Stern: 'Today, 70% of the games, of our games, maybe more of other people's because we have a street model, are in people's homes' and reflection on Playboy as location-only game

  • ?

    product_strategy: Data East actively pursued IP licensing deals (RoboCop, Monday Night Football, Playboy, attempted Adam's Family) as core growth strategy in late 1980s, creating differentiation from Williams

    high · Chronology of 1989 licensed titles (RoboCop, Monday Night Football, Playboy) and discussion of strategic relationship with license holders (TV networks, film studios, magazines)

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Early team assembled from industry veterans: Don Thorne from Chicago Coin/old Stern (factory), Jim Ross from Valley (early employee), Eddie Spears (stockroom to purchasing), supplemented by sent Japanese engineers

    high · Named individuals and their prior affiliations; Eddie Spears noted as still employed at time of expo

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Data East positioned machines as Williams-style games rather than Gottlieb or Bally style; drew design inspiration from Williams' Defender and other early 1980s titles to establish aesthetic and mechanical language

    high · Joe Balzer: 'it wasn't a Gottlieb game that was successful in the market or a ballet game. It was kind of a Williams-esque product' and detailed work history at Williams starting 1981

    • 1:53
    There were three of us. It was Shelly Sachs, Joe, and me. And we started, we needed jobs. There really weren't any jobs for ex-presidents. Nobody would hire us. There's no jobs for ex-presidents of pinball company. All right, I'm going to do this. I'll get in a little trouble. Thank God for me, for me, no, no, you don't know where I'm going yet. Thank God for me. Game plan? Game plan. Wendell McAdams chose to make a different game than Joe's game. He had a game called Loch Ness Monster. And it had ramps and it had Loch Ness Monster under a glass plexi in the play field. And it was a modern game. I always told him it should have been a dinosaur theme. But other than that, I firmly believe that if Wendell had made Joe's game, there wouldn't be any Stern Pinball today. Probably true. Because he would have stayed and done that. But we needed jobs, so we started out at my townhouse.
    3:07
    Shelly and I in the basement, and then made our presentation to T. Fukuda. and the uh and konami at the time and uh well it was really it was really really a fakuda and and there was one other person that was very important to all this and that's ed paligrini yes who who uh i had pledged some apartment building he had put up with some money uh and he was part of the original original group and there we were we're off and going we started in in my townhouse we moved to about four or five hundred thousand square foot building they condemned for her five hundred thousand square i still have so this they stored boats outside it was a big manufacturing place and you took home the carpet on your feet every day because it was red and it shredded reddish orange yeah it was dry rot so we walked through it and it would just cling to you we had one gas heater that We took turns of who would go get the gas. Well, Gary's trying to say there was no heat, and it was about 10 degrees outside. We used to take the garbage home. We took turns. Who would take the garbage home? Until one time when I took it home. We had no money. One time when I took it home in my car, I had a convertible, and, you know, there's not really – the trunk's not really solid. It stunk up the whole car. So I said, I guess we better get a – yeah. It was a building called the Rego Building. If those of you are familiar with Peterson Avenue, it is now Saginaw Village. It was that large. And we had a little teeny corner of the building that actually was offices.
    4:50
    And at one point, there were about 600 water-based fire extinguishers in the building. You guys can only imagine the fight we had with fire extinguishers one day in there. But really, I still have the football, Joe. I have the football. There was a football that came with the place for some reason. The place had been, like I said, slightly condemned.
    5:15
    Gary's daughter, Erin, was probably about six or seven at the time. Five. And walked in, and there were these old drapes by one of the windows. And she kind of shook it, and a dead bird fell out, and she stepped on it. And she ran in screaming, Daddy, it went crunch when I stepped on it. So those are early pinball memories. Laser War, which was the first game we developed, I actually drew Thanksgiving Day that November of 1986. If you want to trace the origins of the very beginning of the very, very first game, there I was on vellum with French curves and compasses. And by the way, we had no parts, so we were just kind of trying to figure out. I mean, we were looking at Wicca. We were looking at everything. We went to Bell and Howell's auction to get furniture. We had a draft table from there. Yep, I think it was about $100. So when you talk about how something bootstraps and starts,
    6:18
    and we had an idea of how we were going to do it and what kind of game we wanted to make, because at that point in time, it wasn't a Gottlieb game that was successful in the market or a ballet game. It was kind of a Williams-esque product. You know, I cut my teeth and started Williams in 1981,
    6:37
    Space Shuttle being the second game I worked on, Defender Pinball, there's one on the floor. Thanks for bringing it, Rob. If any of you look at the second pop bumper on that game, you will see in the smallest print possible known to man, certain design services rendered to Williams Electronics, Inc. by Logical Highs Inc. That was called, we just won't say, you know, Joe worked on it or did it, but it was the amount of credit we would get. Now imagine this. I walk into Williams at that point in time. We were doing a video game with them. I said, I got this great idea for a pinball you got to pay me for. And I said, if you haven't thought of it, you got to pay me. And they go, okay. I go, what is it? I said, Defender. They go, well, we fucking own Defender. I said, yeah, but you got to pay me now. They actually paid me to make a game of the brand they owned. So there's a licensing deal for you, Roger.
    7:30
    It was like, can I sell you your own ice if you're an Eskimo? But that was really, Barry Alzer worked on that game, and it maybe had more solenoids than any game ever up until a modern Jersey Jack game. But it had a lot of product, a lot of stuff on it. but let's talk about our moderator okay so we're gonna turn it over to Orin day moderated or else you're gonna just hear us we'll be here till like midnight just you know spinning old stories so and of course we're gonna probably want to hear from some of you at some point in time you probably have some questions that we may or may not answer so let me just do one thing quick just so we dated we started in 1986 first game in 87 sold the company to Sega in 94 before so through 99 we're talking about right now we're talking nice dog we're talking about somebody with a dog that's pretty we're talking about the state east and Sega same company and that's 86 to 99 the NAMC I have a small part of us at point in time not okay because they actually had the East on 80 East no no no well they did Linda but the data is Bakuda the head of data East was on the board of JAMA was that the vice president he supported not be knock him more who was the head of Namco and therefore he had to be they had to own 20%—that was sort of a giving thing—payback, 20% of Data East Japan, not Data East Pinball. And later, when it turned out that Nakamura's mistress was the business executive secretary of the association, there were some funds missing that Nakamura didn't want to replace, He got out and Nakayama took the head of the association Sega. So then part of Data East belonged to Sega at that time, 20%. All interlockery Japanese stuff. Yeah, we worked for the Japanese for really 16 years. Tell them about the – we'll get you in a little bit, Oren. Tell them about the map with the DE flag and the spelling. well there there was was really kind of not really a map it was when we first got our first game really going and uh we we made um laser warp we received this beautiful clock that i still have to this day it was like a world clock and on the back um it was a congratulations to me and gary and a couple of the other beginning founders of the company, and it said, to Daddy East, RINBALL. R-I-N-B-A-L-L. But that was... We were just as bad, because on the bottom arch, he didn't want anybody to think it was a Japanese pinball company. So he had a little map of the U.S. With a flag out of it with D-E right in Chicago, and it said, Manufacturing Chicago, Illinois, Pinball Capital, spelled wrong, of the world. Yeah.
    10:56
    It's like very Japanese. If you look at an early like maybe Secret Service, it's like a stamp that's printed upside down. If you can find one of them, they're really worth a lot.
    11:06
    But, you know, and we had a lot of really fun stories. Bob Lloyd, who was the president of Daddy East back in the day. Daddy East in California. In California. Technically he was our owner. We would originally go back to Japan with him, and we would always have him paged.
    11:27
    It said, Lob Royd, meet you in the Robbie. His name is Bob Lloyd. But great, great, great stories. But actually, I have to say, Daddies, they were great people, and they stuck with us. Because let me tell you, those of you that have made a homebrew or started some of these little pinball companies that are out there today where, you know, it's more plentiful and easy to find a flipper to buy or a pop bumper to buy. It ain't easy to start a pinball company. It was really hard back then. And we had, you know, we didn't have an electrical engineer for, you know, our first several years of business. This is mine. Yeah. This is mine. So they so Dadey sends over an electric electrical engineer and he's redesigning our system, which many of you know, was a partially reversed engineered Willie system. And he he had a translator who was Portuguese, but spoke in Japanese. Little guy spoke Japanese and they they, you know, he redesigned the whole thing, designed it for us. But I kept asking questions, and he just looked at me, and one day I said, you know, I'm not an EE. I'm a lawyer. And like a light bulb went on because he thought I was the dumbest EE he ever met. Now he thinks I'm the smartest lawyer he ever met.
    12:50
    Yeah, we actually had – they actually sent one fellow over to kind of be our caretaker once, and there was a restaurant named Pepe's down the street from us. It was a Mexican restaurant. And one Friday, particularly for lunch, we were toasting with tequila. And I was toasting with glasses of water. He was toasting with glasses of tequila. So he went to bed for several days and really didn't bother us at the end of the lunch. But that's a different story for another day. So you mentioned Laser War, which was our first game, which we did not license because he didn't get the license. It was going to be Laser Tag through Worlds of Wonder. and Bob Lloyd and Ray Musi were handling that force. It didn't materialize in the last minute. Two stories about that game. One is that it's the only game where I ever got ever suggested to add more to the game, and that was the second ramp that needed more of the game. The other thing is that we showed it to distributors at a laser tag place, and we're all playing laser tag. It was sort of a low spot. Do you remember? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I split my lip really good running through it. Just knocked himself out. Boom. Yeah. Boom. Ran through and cut the bottom lip. Thanks for reminding me of that. I was out cold. But, you know, we show the game at our first trade show. You know, we had some really unique differentiators. Of course, we had the sound system and the stereo sound system that no one had. We had flippers that could break walnuts, if you remember the original brochure. it turned out they could also cook walnuts because they got so hot because phil bernstein bless his heart um had created these little guides because he thought it'd be really awesome to keep the flipper straight and do guy well but the guide created an unbelievable amount of friction that eventually slow you know the pinball slowed down and the flipper was slow so we eventually figured out that was causing that we clipped those the last day but we were really really flying into that first trade show in New Orleans.
    14:55
    We were literally, we built those games in the Rego building. We started with eight of them. I think we eventually got four of them on the floor and kept stealing parts and anything we could to get the game running. We took eight to the show. We showed four. Eugene was kind enough to grab a few parts off the Williams line as he was on the way down with F-14 with the chips in his hand. I have a picture of that. and we weren't sure that the software was really not functioning at about midnight that night. We were almost going to screw.
    15:28
    There's three ejects. They're color-coded. You have to go into the eject, you know, to get each color, and the ball would go in. The ball wouldn't go out. Yeah. So his solution is I'm walking down the street. We're going to screw a post in front of the damn holes. Yes. They're not going in, but we actually, they did eventually work. Now, at one point in time the night before, Gary is sitting, and I don't know why it was this way, on the steps in front of the New Orleans Convention Center. It has something to do with the balls not coming out of the hole until they win. This is now the casino in New Orleans, the Caesars Casino. And he is holding his socks in his hands. He's holding his left and right sock. I do not know why they are off his feet at this time. and we're sitting on the steps and he's looking at me going my children will never go to college i will never be able to afford college he was very serious at that moment this is not kidding we were like we are beyond fucked if this doesn't work and um we're done we're done you know we didn't eventually get the code go to work and the game you know we were in production five months after creating the first game give credit you know richard didn't he was up in the hotel room we're down there i'm walking around with his father on the street he's fixing games drilling holes under him to let the heat out that was true yeah yeah and uh didn't up there he's who had written this you know the software solved the problem at the last minute there's lani out there got here faster than me because it was an accident on the highway you must not come by the highway Wait, Lonnie.
    17:08
    Okay. Hi, Lonnie. Lonnie goes back to our very beginning of – Very first game. Yeah, very first game. Though he would not program Playboy.
    17:17
    He said, I will not program that. He'd program Playboy, and one of the funny stories of Playboy is – and Eddie Pellegrini and I were talking about it. We had two Playboy parties. One, Gary and I were at with Eddie and Margaret Hudson and Kevin O'Connor. and Margaret Hudson back then she was like into aerobics she was strong she was a little inebriated that evening walked up to you Hefner and grabbed him by the arm she almost killed him yeah but Eddie Gary and I we had the big we had a big party and unveiled the Playboy Mansion we had some extra time there and And Eddie, Richard Ditton, and I all left the party on the 21st of February, the 22nd of February, and the 23rd of February. Exactly nine months later, we each had a child.
    18:20
    Okay. Did you know that? No, I didn't know that. Yeah, this is a true story. I, the, the, the date East party there, when we showed the game, I was very disappointed in because Lloyd lost control of his salesman. He was doing sales and they didn't write any orders. I mean, we're all there spending this money. You can't write an order when you're naked and in the grotto. One guy was definitely there. He was definitely there.
    18:49
    But yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Oren. What are your questions? Oren was totally messed Oren up. You notice he's tried to catch up with the video here of where we are. That's Laser Warp over there. So that's Laser Warp. By the way, there's one in our factory. We have it there. That was an eye light on the top. This little thing that's now popular with all kinds of toys. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That thing. The spinning thing.
    19:14
    David did the music. And, of course, if anybody's ever worked with David, he always has to write words for the song. So if you don't know what the song is, you can sing along with it at the end of the game. return to base, return to base, you're fighting a laser war. So there you go. Now you know what the theme song words were. And it says it in the display if you can't understand the volume. The bouncing ball. So what was it like putting that first laser war game on test? Did it go to the location in the back of Gary's convertible? Oh, no, no, no, no. The first one went down to Carroll Stream. The bowling alley there. What did it go in the back of my convertible was the road king. Road King, right? Yes. Because we took a Road King to Ditton's house for him to- We parted the sucker out. Yeah. Okay. We didn't have flippers, neither did the Road King when I was done with it. And of course, we didn't buy a garbage dumpster, so why would we buy a truck to move a game? Just put it on the back of the convertible. Think of it as 39 years ago, we were making our own home-brew pinball that became a pinball company. Yeah. you and Shelley, how did the company grow for other functions like who ran the factory, who ran purchasing? The factory? Oh, God.
    20:29
    Don Thorne. Don Thorne, who came from the old, he came from the old Stern. How does the clicker move? I've got it. He's got it in his hand. Yeah. Don came from Chicago Coin.
    20:45
    So he ran the factory. When we first put it together, we laid it out, and that night I said, this isn't right. I came back the next morning, Saturday morning. He was already moving everything around because it wasn't feeding right. There was too many tables moving it. The only thing we couldn't move is we had a Ford poster press that you need to make pinball machines. And a machinery dealer we knew had found it. We paid nine grand for it. It had been, somebody had had it for 10 years. It had been Gottlieb's. It was one of Gottlieb's too. And that's still, we're still in use at our factory today. We have a brand new four poster. It's the only tour tomorrow. Yeah. Yes. And we had a brand, and you'll see a brand new one that we've never used. We're still using the old Hennig. Did you tell him to serve out the mobster who had his hand in it that they crushed? Sorry. Yeah. It was Gottlieb. They were nice people. And then you had. Except for the punch card. So when did Jim Ross come over? Because he was one of the big guys. Oh, God. He came from Valley. Yeah. It was early on. Early on. God, yeah.
    22:02
    He came all. And Eddie Spears, who's with us today, came not. Sure. It was. Yeah, he was. He was. He was a stockroom guy for Jim Ross. And he's still with us today. And he's absolutely fantastic. he was the matter of fact and he was purchasing purchasing purchasing i think right yeah actually did we have no that's all right that was the other other company never mind never mind so let's see so so um so i've got sort of two questions um what were the discussions surrounding the first license titles at data East? And how did operators respond to it? And I've got a couple RoboCop, but Joe said was the first. But in 89 there was RoboCop Monday Night Football Playboy as licensed titles Well RoboCop happened because they were doing Ocean The list. Oh. They were doing – There's not a – oh, the Daddy's. Daddy's was in the home software business and also the arcade business. They had the RoboCop license for those two brands. And we actually almost had Adam's family because they had a relationship with Orion. But Orion kind of went busto around that, but that was actually offered to us early, and then the deal couldn't happen.
    23:30
    And then it switched over to Paramount, I believe, back then. But that's how we did that. Monday Night Football, of course, the TV show had the pinball, the opening montage, and we went back and picked up the license. and the game was relatively successful. It really wasn't an NFL brand. It was a Monday Night Football brand. I have a great picture of us showing the game at the ABC Affiliates meeting with Barbara Walters squeezing my ass underneath my jacket. I'll share that all with you at some point.
    24:06
    She was very nice. You didn't get that picture? No, I didn't. I don't have that as part of my personal collection. Playboy, of course, we kind of mined some old gold, and Hefner was still a brand at the time. This is the photographic? Yeah. And that's Kimberly Conrad, the playmate of a lifetime, or at least seven years, and two children. Was the other one photographic too? No, the other one was the Paul Ferris illustration. Okay, so this is the one that had the bunch of women and whatever in the back. And the grotto. Yeah, and that there was one lady that had – it wasn't – She was no lady, Jerry, if you remember. No, no, no, no. This one, she just sat there. She was not the grotto lady. Brandy Brandt? She was – it wasn't that she had a poor vocabulary. She had no vocabulary. She didn't speak, and my job was to tell the set person to keep going there and covering her up a little more because she kept trying to – Yeah. It was actually probably one of the first uses of a SciTech machine, Don. The Playboy Mansion actually is in front of where the picture was. We put it back behind it. It actually doesn't exist there. They made you take the nipples off the – Off the family. Of the family. It was like taking two pieces of pepper out of fly shit. It was unbelievable. But now instead of having little black nipples, it had white spot, pure white where they had been. because we didn't color correct over the whole thing. So it was just obviously. It was awesome. So I think we ended up making a decal of two little squares that went over it. But, you know, actually, Playboy was kind of a fun game. Hugh Hefner, you know, would refer. He never remembered guys' names. He remembered women's names, but he only remembered guy by geography or by career. So I was the guy from Chicago with a red pinball. And actually ended up having a relationship with Hugh Hefner for a good 30 years after that. Larry Plosser, who's in the office, has been to the Playboy Mansion many years after. He's in here right now. He prints a lot of Gary's brochures. Not brochures. The back glasses. Translates. Has been there a couple times. But, you know, it was a fun game. We did well with it. again, it was another stepping stone. The business has significantly changed. Today, 70% of the games, of our games, maybe more of other people's because we have a street model, are in people's homes. Playboy, the last time we made it especially, which was post-Joe, it is not a home title. It is not a very friendly home title. The only Playboy I know that was sold to the home, my ex-wife's brother-in-law, ex-brother-in-law bought it, and I don't know why. There's something wrong with him, but that's the last time I saw him.
    27:16
    But it's not a title for today. Okay. So, of course, earnings is a big selling point for pinball machines, But particularly, Gary, what do you think were the big selling points to sell Data East machines over other machines? Well, first of all, we had a couple problems with Williams, to say the least. One of them was that Williams distributors were not allowed to buy our games. And they could do that in those days because they were that strong. And there was a – I was doing a presentation to Date East customers near the end of Williams Pinball.
    28:02
    And I said there – they were Williams customers because they were Date East customers. But they – most of them couldn't carry our pinball line. So that's where I made what was to the people then the famous will be the last man standing. And of Gottlieb Bally Williams, we were the last man standing. But the other problem we had, another problem, we had a number of problems with Williams. One of them is that Joe, in his wisdom, published in replay a thank you to all of our suppliers, which Williams read and no longer allowed them to supply us. Yeah, that was great. So we lost a lot of our suppliers because we thanked them. And that was definitely a no-no. Well, I also know something else that pissed them off, which was really quite fantastic. in Illinois there's a law you cannot disassemble or dump somebody's code so I just happened to an ASCII the first line of the thing that they would disassemble if they dumped the code would say hey Ken hey Larry hey guys know you're here looking give me a call let's have lunch one of these days which pissed them the fuck off now but they did it and they knew it and they then there was one of those things like they they were mad about it but they couldn't say why they were mad because they knew they weren't supposed to be in there.
    29:28
    So they sued us a number of – they sued Data East Pinball a number of times for patent infringements. They had a web of patents. And the last time that they sued us, I was – I'm down with the lawyers, and I said, I'll do the depositions. They got a little more serious when they did something you don't do, which was to sue the employees of the company. So they sued Joe and I personally. And at that point, I said, well, okay, I'm not going to play anymore. You guys, you know, I'll be here. The lawyers all thought I was a genius because I knew about all these games. I was calling him all the time and tell me about this game. Tell me about that game because I didn't know them. But lawyers do something that's, well, the reason they sued us was over their patent for auto-percentaging. And we had semi-automatic percentages, which they thought was a violation anyways. And it wasn't as good. There was another problem with it. And the programmer had forgot to turn it on to hook it up. So they really got pissed off when they downloaded our software then and found out it didn't even work. Or the semi-automatic thing didn't even work. I mean, you push the button, nothing happened. So that was kind of one of those serendipitous moments. But they also, as lawyers are apt to do, they throw in every claim they can. And one of the claims was false advertising, which they quoted something Joe had said, which was not false advertising. It would have lost, but it was in a trade magazine. Not sure he ever said it.
    31:05
    Unbeknownst to Williams, their lawyer afterwards, he said to me after we settled it and so forth, said, it's a shame you didn't have insurance. We did. We had false advertising insurance, so we weren't playing with our money. We were just going ahead and have at it. We just had a good time with them. Yeah, but guys, do you remember, there are a lot of old pinball flippers out here, pinballs on the floor. What was one of the big failures of a pinball flipper? Anybody remember?
    31:35
    Right, the paw would break. It wouldn't hit the switch that would turn off the 50 volts to the flipper. And what would happen? your flipper would burn up right that was like one of the biggest places that pinball companies actually made money was selling parts from burned out flippers that seized up well williams came out with a parallel wound flipper coil by the way they got a patent on you know first thing you learned in double e school you know a series wound coil parallel on coil but somehow they got a high or low wound coil thing. We came out with the first solid state flipper that if your flipper paw broke, because it was on a little board at the time that would time out, you would never burn out your flipper coil. Ever, ever, ever again. And then, of course, eventually became something that became software controlled on the board and whatnot. But if you think about one of the most important things that ever happened in making your hobby, not an expensive hobby, cost us a lot of money we stopped selling as many parts was the fact that the flipper coils didn't burn out so we had a flipper coil and the new flipper mechanism and we got a patent on it and we named it the typhaisy 2006 does anyone know what who what typhaisy is and shove it exactly yeah yeah that was take your fucking flipper and shove it somebody thought it an indian guy that worked for us he was great at this stuff he always did that so what was it that's good that you knew that i'm you who who did that t-shirt coming up
    33:17
    man yeah that is worth the team yeah that speaking of t-shirts so the japanese are coming in and i think it was pearl harbor day what did you wear that's very impressive yeah what what what was Was your t-shirt, Joe? Illusion Islands or something. No, no, no. You had something about Pearl Harbor. Something. I don't know. Okay. Never mind. Anyway. Or tell us more. So before we get too far away from lawsuits, tell us about Multiball. Well, Multiball, real quick, Williams did not own the name Multiball. You know that, right? Does everybody know that? They did not own the name Multiball, even though they sued us. Yeah. All they owned was showing multiball in that one particular font that was on Firepower. Now, we changed it to Triball just because it didn't matter. You know, I got three balls. I got four balls. I got many balls. You got balls and plenty. But they never owned multiball. They just owned the font that was used on Firepower.
    34:22
    They'd love to sue us. They tried to slow us down. In one of the lawsuits, they're sitting there going, look, your lethal weapon game is just like Terminator. Well, no, it isn't. Well, it's got a simulated ramp here. No, that's just a lane. That's a simulated ramp.
    34:41
    No, that's a lane. The ball goes to the top. It goes around. I know a bunch of you are in homebrew or make your own pinball. It's just not that hard to draw a competent play field You start with an Italian bottom. Gary tells you you've got to use three pop bumpers. Not anymore. No, not anymore. They finally got to – the stuff we're doing without three pop bumpers is great. Yeah, he did. You had certain stuff. But it ain't that hard, okay? What's hard is confident rules that make sense.
    35:14
    You know, Roger, I was talking to somebody today. I was playing one or two of the pinballs on the floor today, not a stern pinball but another one. and i'm getting a lot you're not allowed to do that but go ahead i'm getting a fucking headache playing this thing i'm like i said to orin orin you know the good thing about pinball son used to say what do you do you shoot the blinking light and he said to me they're all blinking yeah you know roger if you remember firepower you hit the bank to the outlaws like well again the other outlaw likes put three balls in three holes and you know what that was really fun and challenging But the market's changed, Joe. I know it has. In that you're old, and I'm older. And the people who are buying games for their home today, in our day, somebody bought a game for their home. It was for the kids. They really didn't know pinball. But a 45-, 50-year-old today who's buying a game for his home, he grew up as a gamer. Everybody's a gamer today, and they really understand. So you've got to have something for me in the game. Like he's talking about something for me. He said, let me get multi-ball. We used to make sure people got multi-ball at one point.
    36:26
    But there are deep rules that relate to a different era than the day-dance Sega games, which, by the way, are really fun. What was the first game out there that had multi-ball with multi-jackpots? Anybody know?
    36:40
    He does. He knows. Come on. Probably Space Shuttle. Okay. went into multi ball and keep knocking the target down you could shoot the ramp as many times as you wanted that was probably the very first one Roger you should have known that one so there's only one thing worse than getting old Roger not getting old now what's so boring so or as my sister-in-law says getting old isn't for sissies I don't see out of this side is in so so another first was the dot matrix for pinball tell me tell tell everybody how that came about well you know we were looking for and we were understanding that the marketplace always advanced in sales when display technology changed right went from score reels and score from light bulbs to score drums went to numeric displays alphanumeric displays contiguous alphanumeric displays there was always kind of a surge in sales and gary and i um were pushing forward and came up with the dot matrix and um you know obviously the first one that we had out with dot matrix was checkpoint and you know we had there was the 16 and the 32 and we said hey we can't afford the 32 you know ended up eventually got there and then to a 64 but just so you all know checkpoint was really not supposed to be the first game of the dot matrix it was actually developed on running and working on Simpsons. And that time, Joe Keenan, who was the president at East at that time with Gene Lipkin, basically came to me and Gary and said, you know, if you basically screw this up, you're dead, you're going to be out of a job and you're going to be you're going to screw up the company. And Gary, you know, decided and somewhat wisely that we would take our little extra time and delay at a game in order to make sure we don't end up out of a job. So even though it was ready for Simpsons, we delayed it again. If you never knew that, that is, it would have been actually a game sooner. Checkpoint was actually the game that we had in the can for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, because it wasn't – it mostly wasn't licensed. It wasn't like this, but there have been several wonderful articles about it in the Porsche magazine recently. Yes, yes. They quite love it. It's quite fond. But you would not get away today with doing that. And our German customer, the game was great, and we were doing great with it, and our German customer panicked. You don't have Porsches? Well, they went on. Wait, wait, before you even do that. So Seth always gets a kick out of this. So he decides he's going to do a redemption game. He's going to do Sonic the Hedgehog.
    39:39
    Now, we belong to Sega. Okay, that's fine. It's ours, right? Well, not exactly. You have to, within the corporation, license from the guys who own that property in the corporation or how they want it to be used, they control the profits. Sega Sports as well. We just ran with it. Yeah. Full thousands. And when I tell this to Seth, who comes from Disney, he just gets hysterical because in Disney, you couldn't go use Mickey Mouse on whatever you wanted to do it on. But we didn't care. We just did it. We didn't care. It was very successful, by the way. It was good. I think I know a story about Checkpoint that Gary knows but Joe might not know. Which one is that? is that Joe was very sensitive about those matchbox cars that were on the games. But at some point, the factory ran out of them and wanted to ship the games to Europe. So they went across to Toys R Us and they bought any old car that was on the shelf and put it on there. Yep, worked just fine. But there was a checkpoint that you might have seen in Europe that might have had a Jeep or a Batmobile or whatever. That's whatever they had on the shelf at Toys R Us. Our goal was really simple. we gary and i always understood we have people working in the factory you're going to see people working in the factory some of them that have probably been there almost 40 years we did whatever we had to do to keep that factory running and keep those people employed you know if they're if we ran out of orange inserts it became a red insert it it was keep them employed we've employed a lot of people over a lot of years. Yep. Though,
    41:19
    I will tell you a very funny story. And I call Gary every year just before Ash Wednesday. Yeah. One year, this is when we had the original factory over on Janice Avenue. Yeah. And we were running assholes to elbows in the factory. I mean, it was crowded. I think we were making like 200 games a day. We had one urinal and two women's toilets, one man's toilet, and we had, God, we were building. We were building a lot of games at one point. I was going to get porta-potties and put them outside.
    41:52
    Well, on Ash Wednesday, a lot of people fast. They don't eat, which I wasn't aware of. And one day we're in our factory, and someone's, you know, soldering by the solder pods, and the lady thinks, well it created like a chain reaction in the factory all of a sudden we got 30 people on the floor 40 people on the floor helicopters are flying over the building we've got the news lands up front the news helicopters and you know we probably had 10 ambulances outside and and and we're thinking oh my god you know maybe there's solder in the air maybe there's mercury there's lead we got people in from the epa what happened was the lady hadn't eaten for like a day and she had low blood sugar and she fainted and joe still believes that uh-uh uh-uh we blamed our neighbors it was gas admissions from the neighbor factory and all that we had a guy with some kind of funky meter walking around for six weeks in a in a long white long white lab coat but anyway it was our heaters joe it was our stuff yeah it was our carbon monoxide it was our i think it was ours yes yes i've been bringing them extra donuts ever since yeah yeah yeah he's always bringing on ash wednesday he'd always bring donuts for the whole factory yeah we celebrate that day yeah so what else yeah please eat no shit it was yeah I'm going to monoxide that.
    43:27
    You probably had more than one heater by then, right? Yes, these were the big things. One of them up on the roof, I think, was bad. How are you doing, Kevin O'Connor? I was telling them about the Playboy party and how Margaret almost killed you after. Yeah, he was there. He heard that. He was nodding when you were doing that. So around the time of Checkpoint, there were some other custom games. Wait, wait, wait. So we go to the Playboy party. And this one was Midsummer Night's Dream. Okay? and it's Margaret Kevin Eddie I don't know if he was on that one first of all I like 90% of the guys have on black silk pajamas which I've never worn since I am so fucking stupid I'm sitting there looking at all the food eating the food they're following the cameramen because wherever the cameramen are going the girls are going like this exactly yeah that was like before girls gone wild yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so uh
    44:29
    sorry no that's okay so so around so around that time with checkpoint we'll open it up to questions at some point in time y'all y'all started making custom games that oh god silver game there was a flip out conversion well it was desert so the joel silver game was really important yeah and and let me explain to you how that happened at that point time we had done Back to the Future Bob Gale has become he wrote Back to the Future a lifelong friend Bob at that point in time is turning 40 years old in Hollywood at his party is Bob Zemeckis Walter Hill Dick Donner I don't think Joel Silver was there at the time.
    45:13
    But it was a who's who of Hollywood. So Zemeckis comes up to me and goes, would you like to make Tales of the Crypt? Because at that point in time, Tales of the Crypt was really red hot at HBO.
    45:27
    And he was one of the executive producers, one of the five executive producers, Joel and Dick Donner.
    45:33
    So I go over to meet Dick Donner to talk about Tales from the Crypt. what is Dick Donner filming at that point in time does anyone know t-shirt come on Dick Donner filming what Lethal Weapon 3 so next you know I am with Dick Donner I am with Mel Gibson in his trailer And Mel Gibson is doing Three Stooges and Captain Kirk impersonations for me
    46:05
    He's got seven kids. We send him a Turtles pinball. And for the first time in his career, he gives the right to his likeness, and we end up with Lethal Weapon,
    46:20
    which is our first game that made over 10,000 units. So I'm trying to sell Lethal Weapon to the French, to Avrash, and I'm saying, Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon. It's a movie, Lethal Weapon. Don't you know? This is Lethal Weapon 3. I mean, it's a movie. Lethal Weapon. They never heard of Lethal Weapon.
    46:40
    I said, Mel Gibson and Glover? Oh, L'Infant T'Elle Trois. There's all different names there. But to Lethal Weapon, part of the deal with Dick Donner to do Lethal Weapon, and later he did Maverick, was we had to make a custom pinball for Joel Silver.
    47:01
    So Joel Silver, Dick's supposed to pay us for it, never fucking paid us. He still never paid us. Rest in peace. But we ended up – that's how we ended up with Lethal Weapon. We did, you did a game for spelling. Well, what happened with that was after Lethal Weapon ended up in a magazine called Premiere, the ultimate boy toy from like 1993. And I got a phone call one day, hold for Candy Spelling. Hi, it's Candy Spelling. Well, hi, Miss Spelling. How are you? I want you to make a custom game for my husband, Aaron. misspelling we are not in the custom game business i we don't do that you don't understand i'm candy spelling i want a custom game okay so i go to gary i go hey gary you know how much you know this lady wants a custom game joey don't do custom games i know but she wants a custom game just tell me how much you want to charge her this will just take a while stab at this one quarter of a million dollars she calls me back I said look two things you're gonna have to do in order three things you're gonna have to do in order to get into pay for the artwork and so you gotta pay for the artwork you gotta pay for production you gotta pay some quarter of a million dollars and you have to give what is now my ex-wife apart and one of Aaron's television shows my ex-wife appeared in melrose place we got paid a quarter of a million dollars we made two of them one for aaron's beach house and one person we we we we flew us all out we were definitely we made a bad deal yeah so we we made a bad deal that first of all for the second she won in the second game and only charge a regular price for it which was silly oh i thought I thought it was all fake, too, and it was going to be half a million. No, no, no, no. What happened is we charged it to $250.
    49:06
    We could have charged $500. We could have charged anything. It didn't matter, and that was a mistake. But Aaron was a nice guy, and after the game was done, I actually went out and sat with him and Darren Starr.
    49:18
    I mean, does anybody know who a guy named Bill Haber is? Bill was president of CAA at the time. They put, Roger, they put Bill in, and he worked for Mike Ovitz, in a limo with a sound guy and went around to Aaron's friends for a week for speech in the game. Ronald Reagan did speech in that game. Bill Shatner did speech for that game. Jimmy Stewart did speech for that game. Now, I was always concerned about the one with William Shatner.
    49:50
    Does anyone know what William Shatner's message was to Aaron Spelling? Do you know what TV show William Shatner was starring in at that time? But I'm not sure, but the message was, hey, Aaron, you, me, and the hooker.
    50:06
    That was the message in the thing. That's a lethal weapon. Okay, you also did Kabuki for Nakamura. And that game sits outside of Namco's office today in a shrine untouchable where Mr. Nakamura used to be. So we took Lethal Weapon, and he's a basketball freak, and so he converts it to Michael Jordan for Michael Jordan Foundation, a charity. And then he puts it in the Rock and Roll McDonald's downtown, so Williams finds it, and Allison. It was making $800 a week. It was breaking because it had too much money and you could not get it. But it was a weapon, but different art, you know. Honey, you still have yours?
    50:55
    Okay. So Allison working for Williams finds it. They turn us in to the NBA because he was, if we had him in his uniform, that belongs to the NBA, not to him. The whole thing. They turn us into the NBA. The NBA's lawyers send us a cease and desist. And I have my lawyer write them back.
    51:19
    Thank you very much. These games were built for the Michael Jordan Foundation. I'm sure you support that very worthwhile charity.
    51:31
    Yours very truly, blah, blah, blah. CC Michael Jordan. Never heard a word again about it. Nope. And then, of course, years later we did Space Jam. because you couldn't he's he tried for years with jordan's agent to get jordan but just not gonna happen by the way you've all seen the movie about michael jordan and the sneakers it's bullshit david falk did the deal yeah okay yeah just so you know that's his agent his mom was very nice yeah she didn't do the deal david falk did okay yeah what what stories do you have about Jurassic Park?
    52:09
    Well, we were very fortunate to get the brand and we had a relationship. I thought we had it... We did Tales of the Crypt in order to get something else. I thought it was Jurassic. No, we did Tales to do Lethal. To do Lethal? We got Jurassic. We had a really good relationship with Universal. We were going to do a game, and Roger, I'll thank you for this. We were going to do a game that a friend, Bernie Stoller, had brought to us representing a cartoon book called Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. Which we didn't want to do, but we were going to help Bernie. We were going to help Bernie. We thought, okay, it's pinballs, it's Cadillacs, it's dinosaurs. It's going to be a major motion picture.
    52:49
    Well, then Bernie decides, as soon as he thinks he's got to deal with us, he's going to fuck us. He goes to Roger and says, Roger, you need to buy this before they buy it. I believe Williams paid for it and paid more money than we were going to do it. And our rebound dinosaur game was Jurassic Park.
    53:06
    No, you didn't. But Bernie did get paid. Yep. Bernie always got paid. But Jurassic Park was a great game.
    53:19
    The dinosaur was a little challenging in making it work consistently. We had some early software issues, but we did about 10,000 of that game. So we did three consecutive titles of about 10,000 games. Lethal Weapons, Star Wars, and Jurassic World. In the 93 era? Of course, by the year. That's the 93-ish era? Yeah.
    53:42
    That was a volume high point of pinball because it was coin-op business, commercial business, not hobby business, not home business. Last Action Hero, I see the picture. A great story about Last Action Hero is we took all of our children to the premiere. Gary's daughter ended up with an earache and my daughter ended up throwing up on the buffet line having to close down the Chinese buffet for the evening we used to go we used to take games to the premieres they wanted and Joe was a showman he always set up something special I thought we were going to burn up the Maverick games because they were laying in hay and stuff like that yeah I think the last one for that was Frankenstein and then that sort of died up with the Bruce. Yeah, Kenneth Ronald was a nice guy. All right, next question.
    54:37
    Okay, so... What time does this go until? So we got another half hour. So we should open up for some questions in a couple minutes. Yeah, so we were getting into sort of the end of Data East and the beginning of Sega. Go back to Tommy.
    54:50
    Yeah. Anybody ever play that game in blinder mode? That's cool as shit. I don't know. I can't believe we actually made that work. That's a pretty cool game. Pete Gustafson's daughter was in Tommy here.
    55:02
    And play. And Broadway. And on Broadway. And here, so we all go to see it here. And, of course, you know, they had some pinball machines out there because, you know, pinball wizard. Not pinball wizard, but in any event, they did have the only old-time game was our Tommy. Yeah, and by the way, that Tommy game, we built a version of it that was actually used in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade that they danced on. which I now own. Do you own that? I do. Wow, now I know where it went. The sixth pop-up per game. That's it. So next question. It's cost reduced. That's why it now has three pop-ups. You also did Richie Rich and Kabuki off of Tommy, right? Richie Rich was, again, part of the whole Joel Silver thing.
    55:46
    We did that. It was supposed to appear in the movie. I think it had about a millisecond. And what was the other one? The other one? Richie Rich and what was the other one? Kabuki. Kabuki was the one for that. We also did a showgirl game, which we made one of to test an artist, and also a Saddam Hussein Operation Desert Storm, the game. So I'm reading that. That's just going to do that. So that was off of Lethal, I believe, wasn't it? I think Checkpoint, maybe. No, I think it was off of Lethal. Any event. We had this thing all done. It was going to be great. This would have sold. I mean, this would have sold. So, Data East in California, which was our technical owner, you know, we belong to Data East California. They belong to Data East Japan. Guys in California, they were afraid that somebody was going to bomb them if we came out with a game, put explosives.
    56:36
    That was a ridiculously stupid idea of ours. No, we should have built the game. Make that go away. No, no, we should have built that game. Okay, we'll get that through. We had the Usai and Kusei bonus. The balls would roll like heads. It was perfect. So the transition to Sega happened during Maverick Go back to Mad Yeah, go back to Mad was a cool game We're telling you about the games we never built Or we built only one of Yeah, we decided it just would not sell through in Europe But I spent some time with Bill Gaines We became really friends with the editors of Mad Magazine to this day John Piccarre is one of the remaining ones But that was, if you can't see what it says, it says do not disturb. And on the bottom it says already disturbed. So. Yeah. And that would have been the ultimate Williams ripoff with the Rudy head of Alfred E. Newman. Yeah. So that would have been back to court probably for some reason. Well, I don't think there's a patent on that. Yeah.
    57:38
    Marcus. Marcus Rothkrantz. so transition to sega from data east happened in 94 94 during during maverick it has parts from both games they made six frankensteins that say data east on the side i have one of those um what were the good things and bad things about sega taking over so the good thing was i had money yeah we were still in business We didn't close our doors. Data East ultimately went...
    58:10
    Yeah, BK. Yeah. So, yeah, that was good. The Sega were nice. They're nice people. I have a great story. Did anybody ever see a game I made called Cut the Cheese? It was like roll a coin on an edge into a toilet. Well, the toilet was a very popular kid's toy. It was like the number one novelty bank or toy of the year. We got it at Walgreens. ended up using it you know obviously on uh on south park um a couple years later but i went over to sega the original name for cut the cheese was royal flush there was gonna be a king on the toilet but we came up with cut the cheese instead and kurt anderson did the little mouse with the cheese so sega's coming out with their first polygon fighting game and they're like look this game has you know 15 million moving polygons a second and it's unbelievable and it's This is unbelievable. It is unbecoming for Sega to be making a game with a toilet on it and a quarter. How much does Virtual Fighter make a week? It makes $400 a week. How much does your Cut the Cheese game make a week? $1,500 a week. Rolling a quarter on an edge into a toilet, which takes two seconds, made more money than Virtual Fighter. So that point decided maybe it's not such a bad game after all. Similar to that, when we had – Williams was doing P2K, and we were doing South Park. South Park? South Park. Yeah. Yep. And a couple things about it. First of all, we were going to have a tournament system, online tournament system working with IT. But, you know, first we were going to – somebody could cheat it so they could take the glass out. So we were going to put in switches to know the glass was there, which was – I mean, obviously, you just wire over the switches. Then we were going to put wire in the glass channels so you would know if the glass was in or not. Then we were just going to glue the glass. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. If the ball got stuck, you just had to shake it. No, this was much better. No, no, no, no. We were going to, in case somebody cut a hole in the glass, you know, and put their hand in, we had technology like in a fish finder. So we were going to use a fish finder. You remember the kid? Yeah.
    60:45
    Any event. So that fell apart. But what didn't fall apart is when he put our game on test next to the P2K, we made money. They didn't make so much money. We made a lot more money.
    61:01
    Now, I once went to a test location, and I used to wear, before the 1999 snowstorm, I used to wear a suit to work. I was a lawyer. I used to wear a pinstripe suit, French cuffs, braces, suspenders, and I would go into an arcade to look at games and security would follow me around. I don't know why they would do that. They wouldn't let him within 500 feet of a Chuck E. Cheese. But when a little girl – two little girls were playing South Park and they were about to push the button and said – what did it say? how'd you like to bleep my ass it said suck my it said suck my ass but they but they wouldn't let us say suck my ass because it was too dirty so they bleeped it out and it was even worse yeah yeah because it could have been anything so is there about to start the button i just pressed the start button i just turned around or walked away because i just wasn't going to be there when these two 11 or 12 year olds uh we're doing that um yeah so so real quick before we open it up to questions. Both of you tell about the carpet the carpet looking Oh, gosh. People. You just need to get ROM version 0.96. And it's all in there. Okay. There's a carpet licking race. But yeah, it got turned into the child crawling race. Yes, they didn't. They didn't the modern version. They didn't know what they had. Yeah, there's there's a version of I have at my house and I have a autistic nine year old grandson who really loves pinball. And, you know, last week, he was walking around in Cartman's voice going, bastard! And his mother's like, where did that come from? And he's been playing the pinball.
    62:49
    So we had to bring back all of the – we had to change the code on that, and we had to bring back all of the crap. You guys are familiar with the South Park pinball? Yeah. And you know what happens when the toilet tank opens up? What happens? Mr. Hankey comes out. He and I had the biggest fight of my professional career. Yeah, I wasn't going to let him put a piece of shit on my game. They will never put a piece of shit on a pinball machine.
    63:16
    Well, you know, you take some other games. You can't do that. That's sacrilegious. Yeah, yeah. One day he came to work, and I had about 30 Baby Ruth bars all around. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we did it. So are you telling us that South Park is not going to be a vault game? We had to bring back all of the – from Fantasia. we had that little character from what game was it? was that that one? I don't know old age, old age I'm 80 years old, give me a break so real quick before we go to questions from each of you, favorite out of all the games that we made, favorite Data East game and favorite Sega game well for me, I think they're defined by times you know, different parts of the history of the company of where we were at the time whether it be zone 10 000 or something or something else for me the game that i still play the most and get the most enjoyment out of um all the games i made while at the company is south park i still enjoy and laugh and have a lot of fun playing that game there are other games that we made over time that you know are still really special to me in their own way for their own reason I thought Starship Troopers was an amazing shooting game and had a great great goal set and was a real adrenaline game but then again you know Phantom of the Opera was the game that got us profitable and you know we weren't if Phantom of the Opera had not happened if Ed Sabula had not been there to hold my hand for that game this company would have never survived that was really our turning point game which South Park the well the Phantom of the Opera was one day no no I'm saying which South Park yeah the South Park we made in 99 99 yeah you know obviously Simpsons was a really important game too that was our first game went over I think it's 55 yes it Simpson one unit which which which sentence there were to Simpsons. First one. Really significant. Yeah. I mean, you got to understand, you know, we had Simpsons. We were the third licensed world with the Simpsons. And South Park, we knew about South Park before it ever went on Comedy Central. It was all my Hollywood friends. You know, before there was viral videos, I like received in like one week, five or six sets of A Spirit of Christmas. A VHS. Yeah. And we're watching this thing in my office, you know, just laughing. And then it's like as soon as we heard that they were doing it, we were like one of the very first licensors of that brand. So, you know, that's one or two that, you know, I got ahead of Roger on that one. And then Pastor Gas. And Pastor Gas was pretty good. All right, Oren, open it up for some questions. Okay, let's take some questions from the audience. Oh, Rob, you don't count. We've got to give it to the paying customers.
    66:16
    Back over here. yeah you know total recall was a really interesting game the first problem was how we were going to ship it yes you know it was do we ship it as like slices of pie but the concept was you know timmy seckel worked on it tim came to work for for us one summer um he was uh he had reached out to me he said hey i'm in college i'm studying architecture i did a uh parking garage that looks like a pinball machine and my professor said you are not that good at architecture but you might want to consider a pinball career and I think it wasn't quite that specific you just said something that should probably find another career yeah so Tim called asked for an internship and he came in and we gave an internship and and he never left and that's right Tim still works with me 30 plus years later he works at aristocrat in our hardware department. But it was a project we started working on, which had two pinballs, two playfields at an angle, you can see it and then a top play field that you're supposed to be able to share and have the ball returned at, you know, what the bigger problem was, we were really short on software programmers at the time, we had like one one and a half people and never really got a chance to, you know, get the software really running and make it work and improve proof of concept but you know we it was it was interesting the balls went there it was kind of fun up top but ultimately you know it was this twice as expensive as a regular pinball and we couldn't figure out a little box to put it in so but it was a it was a neat idea is it true that the bottom two-thirds of death ball 2000 is the same as total recall oh deathball 2000 had its own unique electrifying play field i'm worried because soon wanton was the first victim who died a death ball are you guys aware of the death ball was a uh it was a like a national inquirer thing about a pinball called death ball that you know soon want a son who you know played and got 10 000 volts in it and died and it's this things that was going all over Korea. Yeah. So one year for the trade show, for the tour store, we we mocked up a fake death ball back glass and put these two things you held on to and had it kind of, you know, out and out of the way. And then we made fake cards for soon want tease you whatever his name was the game designer that worked for data used to actually create a death ball So we always had fun on the tour we we like take stuff and screw shit to the side of a plate field or a cabinet covered with a sheet and people are trying to sneak under and everything else wait you see what he has waiting for you tomorrow i put a coming soon in one of the dot matrix uh games for that coming soon death ball 2000 the game that people are dying to play Yeah. Next question. Well, what happened to that prototype? It was probably in Oren's basement or something or it got sold to Mike Pasek for a dollar and a half when he came in and bought the rest of our back glasses for 50 cents on the dollar or something. You know, look, you know, we were we were small. We didn't have a lot of room and every now and then we just threw out the trash. Well, if it got put in the dumpster and smashed up, then Gary could write off $50,000 in development costs. There was also a couple people who made a specialty of dumpster diving around our place. Until you put up the fence.
    69:56
    But you got a bigger ladder. What else? I had a key. He had one. Were you saying you're a dumpster diver or you had a question?
    70:06
    Oh, okay. Got it. Nice jacket. Thank you. Look at that. They stand up for a minute. That's our daddy's pinball jacket, and we used to make a patch when we made a game. And he's got a Tommy shirt, too. This is really impressive. It's dead, but it's still cool. Yeah. Okay. Okay, next question. Mike Pace, go ahead.
    70:29
    Oh, I don't know. Well, that was just a guy who wanted a gig as an artist, and I'm like, okay, you know, here's a – we're doing – we were doing – I think Star Trek had time, and he proved to absolutely have no skill whatsoever. But we always tried shit, and we used the lenticular lens thing to make her clothes come off because we didn't have the dot matrix. Yeah, with Star Trek, right? Yeah. Next. So he got to see all of her dilithium crystals. Yeah, I was wondering.
    70:59
    Guys, I'll tell you a funny story. I was with James Doohan, and he was the nicest person ever. I mean, and we, I became friendly with him and he walked through like supermarkets and hand out refrigerator magnets with his signature on it. And he said he and William Shatner just hated each other. I mean, truly had a hating relationship.
    71:24
    And he said, I would walk up to him every now and then I grabbed my crotch and I go, come, I got your crystals right here.
    71:34
    It drove him crazy. And if you ever play the Titanic novelty game, just listen for Captain. She can't take much more. Okay. I knew top sales back in that era, like early 90s, best-selling titles compared with, you know, current Stern, like a top seller like Godzilla, unit sales.
    71:56
    Godzilla's a big game. Yeah. Godzilla's a big game. We don't talk about it. We're a private company, so we don't publish our production numbers because our competitors would just reverse it. They made 27,000 of them. They're more of them than Adam's family. Sorry. They made a lot. No, but it's – And they charged a lot more than for a lethal weapon. It may be the largest run of anything that we've ever done all through the whole thing. But we don't talk numbers just because the whole world can back up and see what we did. And they're still making them. There's one in every 7-Eleven. True, true, true.
    72:37
    Very rare. My question, what was the most difficult license for you to get, and do you have an interesting story about getting it?
    72:52
    He got the licenses. I just got stuck with the contract. And the follow-up question is, what was the most difficult license to have?
    73:00
    Oh, God. You know, I have to say that with the work he does now, they're all more difficult today than they were then. Well, you know, certainly an unobtainium for many, many years was the Beatles. I mean, the Beatles took a decade to crack.
    73:22
    And, you know, the Beatles, we wanted to make, you know, you know, first of all, Beatles is a very fun game to play. And it's a hard and challenging game to play. but when we decided to and i finally got the license and it took years and years and we finally were able to you know do a a presentation that was of that era when the beatles came to be and we want to make the game kind of be a modern game but of that era and then you know we looked at you know uh some really great product that that stern had made over the year and went back and kind of you know reimagined you know their their best play field ever you know everybody's I was going, give us the great stuff, and then we'd give them the great stuff. And it was like, well, why didn't you do that? But we're really happy with that game. That was a very, very hard title to get, and it was over a million-dollar advance to get that title. Which is – Crazy. Yeah, it's just not what we do. It's not what you can afford to do in a regular course of business. Yeah, and you'd always said it was impossible to get Disney, but then you did, and you did, and you did, right? with pirates yeah we've you know we have uh and with disney it's everything you know so many and marvel is disney lucas is disney there's so much of the world is disney right now um just um i don't have any more to say about that yeah let's talk about date east and say Right there on the front row. You had a question? No? Okay.
    75:02
    And what was it like working with him? Any interesting stories about that guy? Marcus is exceptionally eclectic. He lives in Vegas. I still see him from time to time. He's like one of the leaders now of the raw food movement. and you know there was a we were looking for extra artists because you know we had a couple artists that you know we needed to you know I think change the style a little bit and we had a couple guys that were a little slow and it was it was slowing up our ability to get you know hit our production dates in time and Marcus was fast and really you Marcus for a while defined an error whether it be Tales of the Crypt or Lethal Weapon or Star Wars those are some of our biggest runs ever Jurassic Park I know Rob's thinking about getting him in the Hall of Fame in the future which would be great because really for a moment in time he was the look of our company and he's just an eclectic guy and he's a wonderfully nice human being he's just a great person he's fun very creative I mean, if you've ever been to his house, at one point one of his houses looked like the inside of the Pirates of the Caribbean. He was a child savant. I mean, he was truly a Renaissance man. And when he did his painting back then, like the Lethal Weapon, that was just airbrush. He just, he didn't clip art. He didn't start with a picture. He just painted, you know, as he got more rushed into other things. Actually, if it wasn't for Marcus, we would have never had Guns N' Roses because he somehow used to hang out with the band and knew Slash like pinball.
    76:41
    Who else? Back in the green. So one thing I noticed Williams was doing back at the time was being very secretive of their next release. in a lot of your Data East games, you promoted the next game that you guys were making. Yeah, we wanted to know if we'd still be in business.
    77:05
    There's a future. Buy our stuff, right? We're still here. Yeah, I just remember hearing, like, the best game for sale is the one that is available now, not the one that you have. Say it louder. I can't quite catch it at all. I guess I'm all at the wrong angle. I always thought, like, the idea was the best game available is the one you could buy now as opposed to waiting for the future. but that also brings me I guess to maybe Oren on Guns and Roses it advertises Carousel is that a joke or something? It was a novelty game we knew that pinball was in trouble for a while I was curious if what aspect of making and doing everything in pinball is much harder than we all think it is for you to actually do everything now i knew that was coming but no i'm serious everything is this is when joe you know we used to talk about somebody else wanting to get in the pinball business he used to say the water's cold jump jump right in it it you know it it takes a lot more uh there's a lot more in the games today than ever before there's a lot more people involved in it the licensors are are much more corporate uh you know there was one game we paid for the license with the 10 machines that's all they wanted was some games they didn't care about money well and think about the software today yeah bonnie you're there you're doing all this these color display effects and and now you got to make your phone walk up to it and be connected to it and go back to the to the server and remember what you scored so the next time you go up and play the game. It can tell you how many achievements and badges. And then, yeah, you've got to program some stuff for Insider Connected and plan that. I think it's pretty cool. I like walking up to a game. I get my Stern app open. It goes, Joe K., you're here. It's like, wow, that's really cool, right? But think about how much more involved that is. Most of you have probably heard me say it, but the future of any product today is connectivity. I, in Vail, where I live, technically live, I live both places, but when I go to log my computer in, I get Xfinity Hotspot, and number two is Samsung dryer. Somebody's dryer is talking to them all the time. Start my car with my phone, and you're not connected- I got five achievement badges on my dryer for cleaning my clothes one day. cleaning the filter.
    79:44
    Every product has to, if it doesn't have connectivity, it's got to have it. It's the future of the world. I got two bounce sheets as a bonus.
    79:55
    That's right. They came in the mail. Any other questions? Yes. Dave. Phantom of the Opera is like right in the middle of some great licenses and also the most beautiful game you guys have ever done. Except it wasn't a license. It wasn't a license. That's my question. It's not licensed. Is there a story behind why it wasn't licensed after the movie? We didn't try because it was based on the 1812 Gaston Lurkey book. And actually, if you've ever read the book, the book was pretty damn good. But, yeah, that was just one we kind of skated by, kind of got close. Paul Ferris did the art. That's his daughter in the back glass. And it had the two-sided screening of the skeleton that would come through. But that was a beautiful game. Nice, fun gadget. And the sound was fantastic in it. Did the Bose version of it.
    80:44
    Why would you want to pay money if you didn't have to? It's two things. It's not just pay money. Licensors are very demanding as to what your product is going to be. They have to prove everything. And they also have great ideas often about their product and a suggestion for you. They don't know pinball, but they can make suggestions. But the cost of it, the cost not only in the license fee, but in the extra work of doing it. If you can find PD, great. Now, the one thing when you do PD, you have to, the public domain, you have to do, you have to stick to, you have to not get into other people's versions or properties of it uh you use the different mask right it was a full mask and uh so um you just have to be very careful with it chris you got any questions back there you're sitting there really quiet this is quiet for you thank my thank my mother yes
    82:01
    Ah, my car collection. Slot Machine has been very, very good to me. If any of you ever make it to Vegas, come and buy. See my car collection. Got a few cars. I was very fortunate with a social game company that Brian, Eddie, and I started a number of years ago. And probably my most fun car is a James Bond DB5 with all the working gadgets, which was really fun to be part of helping Gary get the James Bond license a couple years ago. But car collection, I'd be happy to show you pictures, but I've been really blessed. I have a wonderful pinball career. At this point in time, my slot machine career is longer than my pinball career. You had a question?
    83:00
    I've seen it in a collection. I saw a Pulp Fiction Translate with a Data East logo. That's right. Again, this is another one of those. I'm an artist. I want a gig.
    83:13
    Go ahead. Try and do Pulp Fiction. I do have a picture of that. If you'd like a picture of it, I can share it with you from my phone. But again, often we had artists that would come in and we'd go, okay, here's a theme, go do it. And if they were good, we gave them a gig. And if they weren't, we gave them the highway.
    83:33
    Yes. Yeah, Michael at that time did not give his rights to licensing. And it was just one of those things. we were doing a game at the time that we just didn't think was good enough to build and we literally built that game in six or twelve weeks we were in production probably if i had hindsight to do it over i wouldn't have put my goals representation in it at all i was playing the game on the floor today kind of a fun game still we had six weeks to program that game do the art build the game make the ramps get a hard tooling for the ramps and be in production so again we could keep those people employed and the game did pretty well there's a number of games where we didn't get likeness rights um apollo 13 we didn't get time but but but he loved the game yeah robin williams tom bought eight of them yeah without a minute robin williams loved hook thought gary was him not robin williams that's um yeah he was he was not robin williams what Hoffman was in it and Robin Williams I was I was Peter Pan you were hooked yeah in that game if you guys don't know that there Peter Pan um and then um but there was one other one we didn't get oh so the greatest story ever and I don't mean to be derogatory in any way shape or form but I'm meeting with Spielberg shown him the back last the twister he looks at us I didn't get Helen's likeness we did have Helen's likeness a little problem with the art so we didn't go back and fix it we had her vision of what she looked like rather than what she actually well there's another problem with light you know with the license license games you know the the the talent is getting more and more critical about how they look Well, that's why Baywatch, Hasselhoff's head is so big because his agent kept saying make his head bigger because Anderson's bigger parts were more predominant and she was becoming the bigger star. And when we did Last Action Hero, I kept saying to him, I looked at the art and I said, good, make Arnold bigger and the kids smaller. Somebody went to see your hero being rolled out of a movie theater on a gurney. But that was a little different than King Neptune, David Hasselhoff. Yeah. Yes.
    86:11
    No, Maverick wasn't a problem. We did have a challenge with Lethal Weapon. We had to make Danny Glover's face bigger. We had to make James Garner bigger.
    86:21
    We had to swap the – James Garner was the extra ball on the wide-body Maverick, and we had to swap him into one of the poker players. We had Angel as a poker player. Another thing that happens with the talent is often they get upset if one person is bigger than the other. Even if they're further behind in the artwork, the depth perception of it. We got one minute. Do you want to close off with the Philip Seymour Hoffman story? Here's a fast story for you on the Beatles. We were about to be finished with the Beatles game, and the Beatles game had to be approved by Troy. Who knows what Troy is? Troy. Anybody? Troy? Troy, P-R-O-Y?
    87:04
    Troy. Olivia and Yoko. You get a T-shirt. So we'll give you a T-shirt. So at the end, Olivia, who was Harrison's wife, said, of the songs you chose, you did not choose one that George wrote. Yeah. even though Apple Corp told us what songs they wanted us to use. I had to spend an extra $35,000 to put that song in the game that she demanded.
    87:38
    And it was less than the normal, I think it was $70,000 a song we had to pay to go in the game. But that went into a last-minute thing. Which is not a – don't – Don't tell anybody. No, no, we don't. We don't pay that kind of money. I wanted that game. I wanted you to all have that game. If you didn't buy that game, shame on you. It's like super collectible now. But for the opposite side of the story, Joe, tell the story about Philip Seymour Hoffman on Twister. No, you tell. Okay. So at the premiere, we had Twister, and he was walking up to the game, and Joe looked at the back glass, and Joe's like, shit, we don't have his likeness. And he walks up to it, and he looks at it, and he's like, this is awesome. I'm on a pinball machine. so some people are some people were good to work i don't remember that at all but thank you arin hey guys let me yes i'm here sum up this uh great meeting you know uh i've known joe for many years mike and i in the early years at fimbo expo got involved with daddy's and many aspects of it and knowing how they always made these uh retitles and uh richie rich whatever it was And Daddy Easter is always willing to do anything just to keep things going and make money and keep the machine going. But for me personally, what was a special treat is when, with Kevin O'Connor's help, there was a guy one of the early years by the name of Harvey Heiss, and he had a dream of a game called Baby in the Hole. And only Joe Kamikawa would say, you know what, Rob, I'm going to build that game for him, and we're going to present it to him at next year's Expo. So this is the kind of stuff that Joe always did for Expo. And because of that, Joe, I have a presentation for Mr. Kamenkow because he's got just about everything anyone could ever want. But this is one thing we've got to add to it. I think, Gary, you got yours last year.
    89:31
    But I created this medal, and it's called the Pinball Expo Lifetime Achievement Award. Wow. Integrity, vision, leadership, and it's got a picture of Harry Mabbs on it. So, my friend, that's for you. Thank you so much, Rob. That's amazing. Well, thank you. That's really special.
    89:54
    Real quick, tomorrow, the Homebrew Pinball Contest. I am leading a pack of judges that consist of Larry DeMar, Eugene Jarvis, if you remember Eugene from Defenders, Stargate, Robotron, Ken Fadezzin, who ran Williams for many years, Paul DeSalle, who ran both their third-party quality, Ed Boon, who created Mortal Kombat, and George Petro.
    90:20
    And Roger. Roger is going to join us now, too, as an ex-Will alum. And we're looking forward to judging the home pinball brew tomorrow. We have a lot of really interesting awards. We have a Gary Stern Award. We have a Roger Sharp Award. We have a Harvey Heiss Award. and um you know please come tomorrow and uh celebrate the people that have done the home brew you know i haven't been to the show probably in a decade it's always kind of bumped up against my trade show or something and it's it's i'm really quite enamored with the wonderful work and the hobbyists are doing um i know how hard it is to build a whitewood and make one work and look good these guys are we're doing super duper stuff so so please please join us tomorrow when we do that. And you're going to see a collection of really a who's who of the industry in the 80s and early 90s. And I will not be here for autograph session on Saturday. I have to leave town very early Saturday morning. But he's going to autograph a bunch of things and leave them here. Yeah. So I have a Sharpie here. Rob asked me to bring one. And if anybody needs a brochure or anything autographed, I'm around the next two days. So I'm happy to accommodate you. And he's got his lovely Walter Day trading cards. I do, which are $35 apiece but going up to $60 apiece. Thank you all very much.
    91:47
    I'm supposed to be at a meeting three minutes ago, so I'm going back. Yeah, I will.