You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime, www.marvin3m.com. Flash Topcast. Tonight in Topcast I'd like to welcome a gentleman that started out working in pinball for Atari and then moved over to Williams, designing games from the Sorcerer, Road Kings, Big Guns, Taxi, Police Force, Diner, Slugfest, Fish Tales, and of course Indiana Jones. And then after Williams he moved over to Capcom and was head of the engineering department and also design Kingpin. I'd like to welcome Mark Ritchie to Topcast tonight. You've probably heard of that last name before Richie. He does have a brother that's involved in the gaming industry also. But Mark has done some great designs for Williams and also did some pinball design in Capcom. And we're going to give him a call right now and talk to him tonight, Mark talked to Mark Ritchie about his pinball work for Atari, Williams, and Capcom. Hello. Mark? Yes. It's Joshua Clay. How you doing? Hey Joshua Clay, how are you? I'm doing good. Am I on time? You're right on time. So you ready? I'm ready when you are. Okay, so tell me about your first memory of pinball and what you remember when you first started playing if it was when you were a kid or in college or whatever. Well, my earliest memory that when I was really small kid, maybe four or five years old, you used to have a summer home up near the Russian River in California. And when I actually came, my uncle had one and we would go up there and spend, you know, a week, two weeks up there to crack and we'd go to the little miniature golf course that had like a bunch of old wood rail pinballs and I couldn't tell you which one but I can remember being just telling up to see over the hand protector and flipping the flippers and pushing the game around. So that was my first memory. That's not real exciting but that's what it is. Is now, was this a family adventure? Yeah, absolutely. And how many brothers do you have? One brother and one sister. And obviously your brothers into pinball is your sister into pinball? No, she's not. Couldn't be further away. Okay, so now how did you, how did you translate this into getting involved in the pinball industry? Well, actually the birth of ants are completely disconnected. Unconnected, I should say. You know, came a lot later in life and I was just getting out of high school and I was I think flipping burgers at a restaurant or something and my brother got this really cool job at Atari and you know, I had been playing games and stuff all along but you know, mostly novelty games didn't have a lot of pinball where I grew up. We had video games and stuff like that and spent a lot of time doing that and I thought wow, this would be really cool. So I started bothering them and basically asked them if they were going to have any openings. I was about to be out of high school and he said, well, it's possible but Atari has a Ryan Policky. They don't hire family. The immediate family is not allowed and can't work in the same department, whatever. So I thought, nah, that's not going to bother me. So I wasn't applied as soon as I finished high school and lo and behold, they hired me and I started working in Santa Clara facility assembling video games. So I started there and about that time maybe a year or two after that, my brother had moved up and do pinball. So he was working an engineering into that time and I wanted to get a real bet of course. I thought that was really interesting. It would be something I could really do pretty well. So I started hammering people around there for that and of course I got the same story. No, they can't have direct family working in the same department. Why I don't know. But so what I did was I was able to land a job in building maintenance with Atari at that time. They had a little empire going in Sunnyvale. They had probably between 10 and 12 buildings and settled around between the buildings and do various tasks. And selling airlines, electrical work, whatever needed to be done. Mostly you can keep me assembling planes holding. They were somewhat automated in those days so there was a lot of maintenance work to do. But got one job in particular in the pinball engineering building where they wanted me to put some air jobs in there. One in 15 airlines for their technicians and stuff so they could do sort of mock prototype assembly in there. So I got the job I went over there and I laid out the pipe and got everything in. The boss of the department gave me the name of Charlie Barnett at that time. He says to me, is this what you want to do? He says, I know your brother. Let me see what I can do. I'll see if I can get you in here. I'm like when? So about that time, that was maybe a year and a half into it. Steve had made the switch over to Williams. So one was out of cleared out of the Atari. Once he left Atari, they hired me to work on prototype, doing engineering, working for the engineers and game designer as assembly playfields. And that sort of thing. Now what's the age difference between you and Steve? I hear. He's older than you, right? Oh yeah, he's much older than me. He was much older. And not as wise though, right? I don't know about that. I can't say that. I can't say that and get away with it. Now how long did you stay at Atari? It was there a total of three and a half years. And then how did you get from Atari to Williams? I met a gentleman by the name of Mike Straul, who my brother obviously knew very well. He hired my brother. And he was out here on some sort of, I think it was a distributor show or something. He was out here on business. And my brother called me up one afternoon and says, what are you doing tonight? And I said, I don't know. And he says, once you meet us over at this hotel in my status. And you know, put a decent shirt on, make yourself look decent. You're going to meet the president of Williams. I said, you're kidding me. And he says, no. So, okay, so later on that night, I get over there and I meet him. Before I knew it, I had a job that, if I wanted, I could double my salary. And I was to start within about a month of that day at Williams. This is 1979. So, how did you make this transition in 79 to working at Williams dad, and then it seemed like around 82 you actually started designing games, right? Right. Well, when I hired on at Williams, I came in. That's time I was a lab tax. So, I was working with the designer. So, I pretty much had the same job. I just kind of transferred everything I knew out there. And I was working on Steve's games on everybody's games. I was building white woods and doing, you know, making parts and whatever had to be done, basically to build a prototype. So, I got really good hands on training on what the right path was, or what I thought the right path was. You know, for things like shot layout, ball guides. I mean, Steve really knew that stuff really well. His shots are really smooth. Some of the smoothest in the industry, no question. Right. And so, I consider myself to have been really lucky, because I think I learned from the best. And I kind of started there. And, you know, basically whatever they told me to do, I did, you know. Now, are you and Steve, are you guys pretty close? Absolutely. Very close. And the transition from California, you know, the Cittari kind of, the Atari work. I don't know if you want to call it work ethic or whatever, to the William Chicago style. Was that a big transition? Oh, God, yeah. I mean, I was a, I was pretty much along here, hippie and, you know, like the, well, I won't say what I like to do in those days, but I like to have a lot of fun. And coming out here was a big culture shock. As this is, you know, this was a, like, just struck me as a really old place when I got here. I'm in Paris, California. And I would just freak out on how old everything was, you know. And just, you know, torn up roads and snow was a new thing for me. I'd never been in a snowstorm in my life. So, you know, that year, 79, we got probably record snowfall. Up to that point, I think, you know, I haven't heard exactly, but absolutely. Many changes had to be made. Now, how did you get from, you know, basically being a, I don't know, a whitewood assembler to actually designing your first game? I call it, I had a really strong desire to design Timbalm machines. I thought it was something I could do. I mean, I wanted to do it. Obviously, it was exciting. Those, you know, Williams was, I mean, they were in those days, they were kicking at, taking names. You had games like Flash, you had Firepower, you had Black Knight. This is when I was doing my sort of prototype assembler apprenticeship. And so, right after that happened, you know, Mike Stroll gave me an opportunity to design my first game. So, I took him up on it and Thunderball was born not the best thing in the world. Certainly not my best effort, but that was my first, you know, I got a shot. Here's a company who gives me a shot at doing pretty much whatever I want. Without, without putting a lot of weight on me or leaning over my shoulder or telling me what to do, I basically was pretty much free to do what I wanted. Sometimes that's not a good thing. But Thunderball, the long story, but what do you mean? They only made 10 of them. No, more out of desire than anything. Well, they only made 10 Thunderballs. Why didn't the game actually get produced? Well, the game had some, I don't know if you played the game or are familiar with it, but we were trying to do some pretty far fetched royal sets. In those days, you pretty much had your standard 3 ball play game. You had the extra ball over here. You had this over there. You had these basic things that were pretty much in every pen ball. I thought it'd really be cool to do something different. Maybe implement sort of a wave structure to the game where it was you against the targets. You would basically stay in the saddle until you lost your lives. Much like a video game. So that was the premise of how we laid it out. Of course, as we all know, it didn't work out well. But it was an interesting concept at the time. Now, how did they not work well on tasks? Does that what happened? Yeah, it just didn't. It didn't run. It wasn't the cast box. It was not friendly to us. We tested about six weeks if I recall correctly. So we really gave it a good shot. The body was not coming to life. Right. As they say. Well, then you went to Firepower 2. Tell me about that one. Firepower 2 was what that was. Obviously, it's equal to Firepower. I wanted to do something a little bit more conventional at that point. I'd sort of, after doing that, I kind of felt, that's probably not the right way to go. I probably had to trace something a little bit more conventional. I like the idea of a ramp and getting the ball up. I've seen some old Erie Williams. He did a parachute game. You'd probably know this better than I, but he did this. It was one of his earlier parachute games. I want to say in 1940s, 50s, where there was an elevated wire form. There was a hole kicker that would shoot the ball. Yeah, they shoot the ball into the hole kicker. Then it would kick it up, kind of like free fall. Where it would shoot the ball up and over on top of a wire form. And then it would, you know, bring the ball back to the flipper. I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if we could have a ramp view that would shoot a ball into a ramp, fly up over the play field and come back. Now, Zee-Non had already done it, but not with a wire form. They did it with a plastic tube. So I thought, you know, that's a good place to start. And I like, at the time, fire power was my all-time favorite game to play. And I love the rules. And I just love three ball-malfi ball. And, you know, the ease of that game was great to me, because it had really easy to understand rules yet that game would. You would like that game to win. And, you know, I think that's the magic. I think that's the magic in every game. You know, that had a lot to do with why fire power too happened. Well, you did pretty well. I mean, you saw 3400 units in 1983. That's actually a pretty good sales number. Yeah, those were tough times. Games were not selling big in those days. As, you know, we were getting hit from all sides with, you know, video game on slides. But the industry wasn't bad shape back then. So, yeah, that was kind of a goal spot for us, you know. Now, how do you think that the fire power name helped your game sales at all? Or do you think that had nothing to do with it? I think it had very little to do with it, to be honest. Okay. I think, you know, I think that, on a level, but I think beyond that, I can't really say that anybody really, you know, I've never had that said to me where, God, what a great sequel, you know, typically people don't talk about much at all. Right. Right. Now, you then you went and did pen and fever, which was a Williams pitch and bat. Now, how did you get involved with doing baseball games for Williams? Again, this is something that I seeked out and went after. I asked Steve Gordak if he would have a problem. If I laid out a baseball game, I was excited about him. I played baseball as a kid and I always loved those games. And I kind of had a nostalgic bug while I was doing that. You know, when I was designing games, I did that a couple of times. But I just, I loved them and I just wanted to make something that would be, you know, I thought it'd be fun again. I've been a while since people had seen one. And, you know, we saw quite a few of them. Gains that okay, we had the consecutive home run feature in there, which was really fun for people. You know, it was something that I just wanted to do, you know. Okay, no, I mean, did that, you know, not to jump too far ahead, but then in round 1992-ish, 91, as I should say, a slugfest came out and you were the designer of that game too. Was that, did you get this reputation at Williams as kind of being the baseball guy? I did after I did the second one. But again, that was inspired by the desire to, I wanted to build a game around, winning baseball cards. You know, that's where that happened. baseball cards were extremely popular then. My kids were collecting, I mean, was a huge thing again. I remember that when I was a kid and I thought, wow, wow. You know, what if the game spits these things out and you got a home run, you got a couple of cards, all cool, that'd be. So, you know, that kind of inspired that. And again, I went and said, hey, I'd like to do another baseball game. What do you think? So, you know, they went for it. And that was, of course, under WPC, I believe that was a whole right system. All we said are rules. We could do all kinds of stuff with it. You know, and did. We had talked about putting a man run, you know, in there early on. And kind of said, you know what? There's a dot matrix thing happening. That's coming up because we were prototyping it on a couple other games. I think Steve's Terminator was around the same time. Right. And actually, the success came out before Terminator, I believe. Yes, it did. Right before. And we ain't, Steve was pioneering and working with that display. But we kind of, and it was kind of, we just kind of hopped in and grabbed it. It was like a timing thing. They were putting the engine errors. We're pretty much done with it. We had to work in and I thought, hey, you know, this needs to go in the baseball game. We can have, we can have another game in here. We can do a lot with the video mode dying. I mean, you know, so that was really an issue of timing. But I think Terminator was slated to be the first game to have that. Right. So now, now the, the whole. If your customers are anything nasty out of that, I think everybody was pretty much agreeable because it wasn't a pinball. It was a novelty game. Right. Now that a whole car dispenser thing, you know, then they came out with that hot shots game, which was the basketball game that had the car dispenser, too. Were you involved with that at all? No, I was not. But they took your car dispenser idea and recycled it into that game. Yes, companies making brass months in the mechanical engineering. And a lot of that stuff gets kind of tossed onto the next game that can use it, you know. Just as a way because I'll tell you, novelty games you're looking at, looking at much lower sales across the board, they would, you know, they were seasonal for one thing. A baseball game is a very seasonal thing. Just to clear, you know, 1500 or so maybe in the first season, and you might come back and build it again the next season, you might do it again. You know, the following season, but it was always only during the baseball season and toward the middle of summer. And, you know, so when you had the opportunity, you would try to burn up inventory on the next game. So it seemed like a good thing to do with the basketball game. Now, Slugfest did really well. It seemed that Williams actually made that in two entirely different runs, maybe based on your seasonal thing. That's correct. Yeah, we did. Actually, I think there were, I thought there were three runs. I thought it was. Obviously, the first year we built it was, what did you say, 92? 91, actually came out in 91. Okay, so up until I would say 90. Part of, I think in the spring in 93, they both sound too. I could be mistaken, but, you know, not big runs, you know, maybe 500 here, and I kind of kept this going. We had the thing build and design, so it was not a big deal to fire a backup on the line, you know. That must have kind of made you feel good, especially since Williams did not like to go back and re-en- and change the line again for something in such a short order. And here they did that on your game. Well, the only reason they did that was if there was ample demand for it. Right. Otherwise, no, they wouldn't have. I can guarantee you. Well, the skip back, go back and back where we were at right after pen and fever, you did like Sorcerer and Road Kings. Tell me about those two games. Sorcerer was, that was kind of a transition point for me. I think at the time, what's working with, I think the program on that game was Ed Sahaki if I'm not mistaken. Ed and I kind of carried off and wanted to do something kind of on a magic, kind of a magic kind of theme, but not, you know, we couldn't spend a lot of money in those days. There were budgetary, a lot of budgetary constraints. At one point the game wasn't going to have speech. I had to fight for that with the president, you know, basically get all my needs and big for speech. They weren't going to do it. Too much money, you know, what not. So that was a tough time actually. That's why there was a whole lot of crazy stuff on the games, you know, at that point in time. So we were under a budget and under a pretty strict schedule. The recall we were, I forget who else was there. What other game was in front of us and what was behind us, but there was a little bit of a constraint and kind of hurrying it up and getting it out there and it really didn't get a, I didn't ever felt like it got a really fair shake, you know, sales wise because it kind of got bumped by the next game. Which we did a lot, we had to do it in those days because we had to move the product, you know, keep the factory going. So that was one of the deals, you know, at that time you made money when you could make it, you know. But Sorcerer was, you know, I thought it was a fun game. I enjoyed the top half of that play field a lot. That three bank shot with the kind of weird place flipper. I mean, I have memories of Cordack. That's when I had some good Cordack arguments. And I kind of locked horns on the rules. There were some things I was doing that he didn't particularly care for. I don't remember exactly what, but he made a suggestion to me about doing something to clarify the three bank drops I get rule. I don't remember what the heck it was. He says, what the hell is, what is this? Yeah, but I had little of a lamp with something on the white one. He didn't know what it was or how we were, how it was going to play into the rules. And I kind of explained it. I was getting nowhere with the explanation. And finally, I just, okay Steve, you win. I'm changing it. So, you know, I think it was the other, I think we swapped the thing out for an extra ball or something up at the right hand side of the game. But I had some other feature there. Been a while. What was Cordack kind of a micro manager type guy? Not really on that game for some reason. He felt kind of attached to it. He kind of, I saw a lot more of him at that point. On the other two, I saw very little of him. I hardly ever, you know, you heard the over talk. I kind of felt like a, I don't like an orphan in a way. I guess, although I really didn't think I needed a parent, you know. I think there were just some weird things going on between management, upper management, my brother and things that were going on there that kind of made that uncomfortable for him. I was totally comfortable with it, but, you know, there was kind of weird. You know, most of why people do the things they do. How was it, was it strange that your brother was working in the, in the same department, basically doing the same thing as you and, you know, obviously he was pretty successful at this. Did this put a lot of pressure on you? Absolutely. It'd be a lie to say different. If it, I was very pressured by it, but I thought of it as good pressure. I never thought of it as negative orable. I went out in here. I hate this. It was productive for me. I think it made me a much better game designer in the end because, you know, when you're in a, when you're kind of like that, you're, you want to do a good job of what you're doing, but more importantly, here you're working in a creative field. You're in a very creative area where, you know, you're the boss. I mean, basically what you decide ends up on that game, you know. And so there's a great deal of responsibility that you feel toward coming up with just a great product every time. Well, I didn't let that stuff really bother me. I concentrated more on, I'm trying to do the best I could. You know, and but there are times when absolutely you felt like, you know, I got a top this guy. I was a little brother. I can't say here and not, you know, have a number one game or have a hit game, but you can't hit games all the time. You know, it just doesn't work that way. Unless you're Steve. Steve is very, very good. And, you know, there's no doubt about that. Now, did you two ever collaborate on games together? You know, did you give advice to Steve and Steve? Give advice to you? Okay, you know, yes. It was more Steve giving the advice, but you know, it was good advice. It was stuff that he felt. It was not anything either. It was never anything, you know, evil or overpowering. It was always what Steve is a really honest person. I'll tell you that about my brother. He never holds back. He says what he thinks, which I have a lot of respect for him for that. And he will always tell you the truth and never lie. And that is exactly what he will tell you. But sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's tough to take. The delivery isn't, you know, the way you want to hear it. Right. Now, there's back going on. And at the end of the day, it, most of the time, it was the best idea. It was the right thing to do. It made the game better. That's all that matters. Hmm. Now, was there ever a time that you gave him some advice that, you know, you could always go back and say, hey, I told you so. You know, not back then, but I would say recently, you know, we collaborate on the stuff he doesn't start. Yeah. You know, we'll say what do you think about that? I'll tell him what I think. And I'll go, I didn't think of that. It's a cool idea. So it's happening now. Once in a while, you know. All right. Now, road kings came out right after Steve's high speed. What, what was the thinking with road kings? And how did that game go? Road kings. Let's see. That started off. That's an interesting story. That road king started off as a game called Samurai, originally. And I had been struggling with the theme. I had a couple of themes in that game. I had another one like a sort of a futuristic city at one point. And then went to a samurai theme. And then finally settled on road kings. Just out of the popularity of the Mad Max movies that were out at the time. I thought that was really cool. And I thought that was something we could we could profit into this, you know, sort of post-apocalyptic Chicago with a, you know, biker gang cruising up like short drive. I mean, we had all the inspiration and ideas started just flowing, you know. Also, this is also a side line side note. The guy that broke that gang is now my boss at Play Mechanics. Really? Yeah. George Petro. Yeah. So he actually was going to school while he was programming the game. At one point, we wanted to start working on it. I wanted to start working with my own opinions. And at least, you know, put some stuff together and start moving on the Playfield. So George says, well, why don't you make the miniature, make the miniature like quarter scale, you know, piece of wood with some belly bees. And then all I heard out and make them work. So what we did is we shrunk down the Playfield drawing. And then attached it to a piece of a quarter inch plywood. And throughout a bunch of holes in it, wherever the light positions were. And so he basically had all his lamp routines done while he was down in Indiana. So on the school. So then he brought it up and then he'd work in the summer. And, you know, he just, he cracked on the game. Whenever he could, George was, you know, there's another, there's another success story about desire. When you want to do something bad enough, you can do anything. You know what I mean? Now, did you, did you try and use the same programmer for every one of your games? Or did you just, no? No, never. It doesn't work that way. Basically, you got, you got who was ever available, you know? I mean, you could try to get, you could try to get guys if things were, you know, kind of working out that way, lobby around, talk to guys and catch your idea, whoever, you know. And sometimes you could get, you know, somebody to go, hey, I really want to do that. And, you know, they'd work, they would do everything. They could get to that point and get that game. But usually it didn't work that way. It was more, you know, whoever was available. So you got, at least for me, I didn't, I didn't really have the option to pick my team. Now, there are people that could do that. But, I wasn't one of them. Now, at that point. Now, with, with road kings, you said that, you know, you had these multiple themes. Were, were you the one that was picking the themes or was this dictated to you? Oh, no, I was picking the themes. Okay. And, you, and the, yeah, the Mad Max thing that was a, that was a pretty strong, a pretty strong theme back then. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was the, that was the shit for us, you know. We thought so. We thought that was going to do really well. And, in fact, it did do very well. And, in Germany, Germany was, they loved it. I think we sold 3,000 of those games in Germany alone at that time, which was pretty tough to do, you know. But the Germans get off on anything with a motorcycle. Anything western, anything, you know, they just love the action adventure, whatever it is. That stuff works really well over there. So then you did big guns. And, you know, the backbox on big guns is, is so tall. Now, what was the inspiration behind that? Because we wanted to, I believe, we had a couple, there was a couple of things going on. We, we had a, we had a feature up in the game. It had a, it was like a little chinko game. Right. So there was some pretty heavy duty mechanics. It had to go into that up there and sit on the inside of the insert panel. So we were a little bit concerned about the room behind it. We also moved the speakers up on top. So I come from the bottom and put them up on top just to get, I guess, some of it was just to be different, you know. Did we do that in that game or not? You know what? I don't remember. I don't know if that's true. I can't say that. I think I did that on police force. Now, when you made a major design change of the, of the cabinet, you know, hardware like that, would it, would it, management give you a hard time about stuff like that? Um, not at that time. You know, I didn't really get, I didn't have too, I don't recall any, I didn't, like that really going on. Um, big guns were more designed around. This doesn't happen often, but it was designed around a component or a feature in the game, was designed around the catapult. It came off with the catapult and I was looking for a good spot to throw that. How would that work? How would that work? And, you know, what kind of a theme do I need to make that work? The whole castle thing kind of came to mind. And, um, so we started with the castle and we were looking at more of a medieval theme on Python and I. And it was sort of a lot of Python, maybe absolutely the observation that, um, those catapults looked ridiculous. We had to cover them up because the ball would hop into them and inadvertently. So we had to put these covered clear covers on the top of them. So rather than just arbitrary, it's not ever on Python and it is, it is awesome. Skyl, um, you know, the cannons. So the castle became a science fiction castle. And there were troops attacking the castle because of the, you know, it's the old story of good versus evil. There was the, uh, evil king and the tower and the princess and yet to rescue the princess. And so it all kind of came around. It was built around the catapults, in the honest. Which actually morphed into guns. Yes. Right. Right. Because you just, you just didn't like how and how would the, the overall look of the catapults? Well, the problem was, again, we couldn't, we couldn't protect them from balls hopping in over the top because it was a, the type of mechanism that, you had two problems. One was you had, you had to worry about balls hopping in there and getting caught when they weren't supposed to be in there. And you also had to worry about balls getting behind it when it fired because of the enormous power of the flippers and things going around the, around the game, you know. You had to worry about ball hangups always. That was a nightmare and it would creep only any, you know, basically you think, any, whatever you think about, you know, this is going to be fine and we'll need to worry about it. Nine times out of ten, you are always wrong. The ball will find a way to get hung up. Yeah, I mean. Right. So that was kind of a double-edged sword. We really didn't have much of a choice. We had to cover him with something. So, now sort of a plastic dom and then we thought, okay, well, let's make him look nice. That's sort of in the guns, you know, makes sense. So these catapults weren't anything like, say, the catapult on medieval madness then? No. No, not at all. This is a really good catapult. I mean, absolutely. I've used it on several games. I mean, it will fling the ball through the air, three inches above the play field surface. And make the ball fall ass. Not even. Yeah. It's just a cool thing, but you had to be really good. Well, you used it. It made it really, you know, you were really limited or you could put the thing. I kind of learned my catapult lesson on big guns. Don't put them in the middle of a play field. All right. Then you worked on taxi too next, right? Correct. And now, was taxi collaborative effort with a bunch of guys? It's just kind of seemed that way. It was pretty, I found myself. Okay. The pretty much drove the cab on that one. A lot of Python. Python was, you know, it was not. It was just nuts and it was great. I mean, we were making good stuff. The game went together really smooth. The shots worked. You know, the characters. That was a really goofy thing. It was just goofy, you know. It's just about being goofy or just having fun. There was no serious, you know, let's make a taxi game, you know. It didn't start off as, you know, as it wound up. It was, it did start as taxi. And, you know, was built into this just goofy ass playground of crazy shit going on. Now, did you have any, did you pick, help pick any of the characters that were, you know, in the taxi theme? I think the only character I picked was Dracula. And maybe the Maryland character. Now, you guys had the whole Maryland thing when you got in a sort of issue with the Maryland. Yeah. I mean, Roger Richmond agency who owns Maryland, Monroe's estate. Sort of caught one that we were doing. I don't remember exactly whether or not we, I think what we did was we called that. Somebody, somebody I forget who said, you know, if you guys check this out, if you guys like done any research, you know, and I go, well, it's not really Maryland, but they're calling it Maryland. You could have a problem. So we found out who owned the estate and sent down the information and they go, you owe us some money if you're going to keep doing that. And we went, okay, well, we're going to change it to Lola. So that's how that occurred. We actually, we fired the first shot across the ballot. Now, why Lola as a substitute name? Very sprucely on her legs. If you look at the care, turn the back glass, that's cracking me up to this guy. It's a little bit, she looks a little manly. So Lola was an old kinksong that I knew was about a, right guy who hangs out in the bar and he meets this beautiful look and that best. Yeah, it's a song about a transvestite, right? No. That kind of came to mind. Now, did Python do the art for the taxi back glass? Yes. Now, did Python do this on purpose kind of this manly figure? I don't think so. No, I think he intended it to be, he liked big women. Python was a fan of Amazon women. You know, I thought what he would call them, Amazonia. You know, that was his thing. You love big women. So he made her look really big and I think in the process of that, she just kind of grew some mighty big legs, you know. She's, I mean, if you all you got to do is add some hair and, pretty close. Pretty close to a man's legs. I always thought, oh, I don't know. And I don't mean that in a nasty or kind of sending way. It's just the way that I saw it, you know. Right. I don't know if other people saw that, but that's what I saw. Huh. Oh. Now, you went, the next game you did, it looks like it was police force. Now, the police force, did that start out as police force? Or was there another theme? No, that's sort of a, we were not as bad men. We, we were going to go after bad men. And we had a complete, the game was pretty much, I would say, at the, I don't know, the concept was 100% done for it. We had pretty much everything figured out where, where, what was going to be where, without having your working knowledge of the script. We hadn't seen a script. We hadn't had a deal. I knew the movie was coming up, but we didn't know who was going to get it. So we made a play for it. And we were not successful in getting the theme. Did he? He's got the theme. So we didn't, I didn't get to do that. So we had to kind of change things around a little bit. And, and I came up with the police force deal. And, you know, very, very asked for it. And I came with me. That was kind of a collaborative effort. Now, when you did a collaborative effort, was it, was that an easier thing to do, or a harder thing, or was it one of those things where there's, you know, too many cooks ruling the stew, or how does that work? Well, given the, the personalities at the time, there he was, you know, he was, he was wanting, he was, he had some time on his hands, and we needed to get the thing done fairly quickly. We had another damn behind it coming again, you know. The push came to shove, so we kind of teamed up just to, he was a much faster gun than I was with a pencil. He could, in those days, we were drawing games by hand. And I would come in and, you know, we would talk about the features. And I kind of, I guess I could sort of manage that, you know, way. And I'll very withdraw up everything and make it happen. So, kind of Python as the, as the guy with the inspiration, and me as the, I would say producer. And Barry, you know, would basically make everything happen and make the shots work. And all that stuff. So, it was kind of a different, that was a different role for me, you know. No question. But I did exactly why the Hurley came, but there was, I think, some other damn easy to happen. And we needed to crack the thing out fairly quickly. Now, another one that you did that was actually really, I mean, it's game I really, really like is, is diner. Now, who came up with that theme? Actually, that was myself. And guy by the name of Mark Sprenger. Guy who did the fire and did some other stuff, did some great stuff. Mark and I worked on that. We both kind of liked the idea of doing a, you know, a 40-50s era, sort of Pullman card diner. That's kind of where that started. And I was pretty much, I was in the doing this nostalgic thing at that time. You know, that was really a cool thing for me. I just thought, I was a collector or enjoyed, history, I enjoyed, you know, that era a lot. And I thought, you know, this would look great in people's basements. Anybody that wants to do a game room or just would fit into a restaurant, an environment or atmosphere. This would, it's a fit, you know. I just thought it would be a fit. And so, that's where we started with that. And the character thing came in there also. That kind of came off taxi at that point, I believe. And we sort of integrated a lot of that same interaction with the characters that taxi had. It worked so well on taxi. And I thought, you know, let's do this again. Well, we want to use some more controversial characters this time. Let's use Manuel Noriega. Let's use Margaret Datcher. Let's use, you know, okay, the Mexican guy, the little Pepe guy. That's actually Manuel Noriega. And how was management's reaction to this? Was there any of this political and correctness thing going on? I'll tell you at that time, there was none of that. I mean, we were a little bit worried about Ronald Reagan. We put a roller coaster. That was a little bit. I remember that was a little bit, oh, I don't know about that, you know. But aside from that, no, no one, you know, I mean, everybody was, we were, we didn't have life and thing, you know. So we needed to like, we all felt like we needed to put a little extra punch in the game somehow, you know, maybe this would help pull that off, you know, certainly make it amusing. I mean, you know, there really wasn't a lot of argument from upstairs. Not much at all. And the kind of three-dimensional backlash with the characters kind of like on spring. So when the game moves, they bounce back and forth. Was that your idea? Yes. Originally, well, budgetary constraints, originally those were going to be on, they were going to be soul-knowing operated so that when you serve the customer or the customer will pop up in the window. And you know, vibrate around or shake around and the world was doing the little speech call. You know, that was going to be, that was planned, that was going to be an interactive feature of the game. But the budget came and got us again, you know. We couldn't do it. So we spring-mounted them and just had them kind of flopping around. That would have been cool. I think that would have been really cool. Yeah, no, I think that would have been a really cool idea too. You kind of ruined it for me now because now I got a different... Sorry about that. You asked. No, it's still like, I really like Diner. I think it's a really, I think it's a great game. Certainly one of the better games of that whole system 11 era. I think it's a great effort. So I mean, and the, you know, I like the political incorrectness as sick as that may sound. Right, you know. But... Now, what involvement did you have with Riverbolt Gambler? Not much at all. Other than the, I did some Dan Fordon who was doing the sound on that game. He wanted me to sing this little ditty. I was like, I can't. What are you talking about? You want me to sing? Yeah, we want you to sing the song. Here it is. And you like sang it for me. Because I want you to picture like Gal Johnson, you know, like a, like a menstrual. And you're doing this Riverbolt, the little tune about the Riverbolt Gambler. And I'm like, I don't know. So I did it. I don't know what the hell I drank or, or smoke before I did it, but I did it. And how did you feel that came out? I thought it was great. It played out great in the game, you know. I thought it was cool. Yeah, I mean, had you ever done any singing before this? I sang back around in a band. Actually, I noticed I heard Eugene and Steve on your previous podcast. None of them talked about the band that we had. We had a band we were called Brain Damage. And we would play it like parties, you know. Mostly people that worked in the industry a lot of people remember us. We were around in those days, Larry DeMarne, several people that were around. But yeah, we did that for fun. No. So yeah, I did some background singing in those days. So Steve played guitar and you did some singing. And what did Eugene do? The keyboards and sang. Eugene is a fantastic keyboard player and a very good composer. He wrote some really wild songs. You know, some great stuff that we still laugh about today. Sound called Love Doll, which was, you know, I'll send you the lyrics of that. Why are they that easy? Oh, they're easy. Not too bad. And when did the band break up? God, I want to say, right before I got married, which was 1983. So 82 in there, 82, 83. And who was drumming? He was not in the industry. He was a friend of ours. We had two drummers. We had to get by the name of Mike. I don't remember his last name, but these guys were unrelated to the industry. They were not involved. Even I and Eugene were the only three left. We used to practice at Williams at one point. And how did that go? It was great. We'd do it upstairs in engineering. You know, after we would leave, we would like set up our job in and like play in the engineering room, you know. Those are fun days. All right, we're going to take a little break of talking with Mark Ritchie and we'll be right back after this message. Deep in the forest of eastern Canada, you will find something well ground breaking and something that's very, very pinball. But something that's really, really small. Presenting classic play field reproductions. Two guys in their basement. We've got the passion. We've got the gear. And we've got the quality. Doing our very best to remake classic and more modern pinball replacement parts. Classic play field reproductions. playfields. Backlaces. Plastic sets. On the web at classicplayfields.com. This portion of Topcast is brought to you by Pin Game Journal. Covering the world of pinball is them online at www.pingamejournal.com. All right, we're back with Mark Ritchie of Williams and Capcom pinball. Okay, well, we talked about slugfest. Now, just a couple of little questions about that that we didn't really talk about much. Now, you talked about the running man unit. You felt that the dot matrix display kind of superseded the ability to actually have a running man unit. So, you mean the running man unit wasn't having really nothing based with money. It was just that we can do the same thing with the dot matrix and we just don't need it. No, I think that what's more about kind of bringing things to you a little bit. You know, there was a lot of talk about the man running unit and the need to put it in the game. I guess at some point we just thought, you know what? It's been done. It's nice. It's cool. But what if we could do something? You know, I mean, this was cutting edge technology at the time and then we were all about that. We wanted to, you know, what if we put a base runner in there where you can steal bases and have an actual interactive part of the game rather than something you watch, you know, after the fact. So, I think that was really the thing that pushed it forward. Now, in the whole development of the dot matrix, you know, the software and the graphics to do all that, did that hamper, you know, your production timelines or anything to make all that stuff happen? No, actually it didn't. We were pretty far ahead with most of that stuff at the time. A lot of it, like I said, I think Terminator was being developed around the same time. Had got no out of that stuff out of the way, the interface, the way that we were going to talk to it with our work and that sort of thing. We figured out what we needed to use on the development level to generate, you know, the animations and what not. So, a lot of it had been figured out already. So, it was pretty much a step in the saddle thing for me, you know. Now, did you guys, you know, like, data ease came out with the whole dot matrix thing before you guys? Did you guys have to feel pressure because of that to develop the dot matrix? That's an interesting question and, you know, I don't exactly recall if I can't imagine data eases doing anything before we did those days. I really don't remember what the situation was, how we felt about that. I'm going to have to take the fifth on that one. Okay. Now, I mean, when speaking of which, I mean, did you guys, you know, what was your outlook on data ease at the time? I mean, did you really feel like they were always like, you know, copying you guys or nipping at your heels or what? Oh, yeah, well, we knew there were copying us. We knew that they were, that was going on. You know, I knew it was still. I mean, you look at games like Secret Service. You know, I don't need to tell you this stuff because everybody knows, you know, that was not, that was basically a flip of a game that we were working on. High speed. And, you know, I think that, I think what makes you mad when you're in that position is you feel like you're doing all this work to innovate and really try to do something cool and different, you know, capture people's imaginations and get them to play in like your games. And then you see other people just kind of step in and grab stuff and just not, you know, really work at doing anything original kind of pisses you off, you know. So I think, I think there was a, we all felt like there were, yeah, there were. Somebody was getting too much information at Data East, you know, we don't know how that happened, but yeah, definitely it was, it was a drag. So you feel that there was some sort of internal mold almost going on? I don't know. I can't speak to that. I don't know. It was just very interesting set of, you know, the way things happen, the timeframes that they happen then. You know, it's unfair to know how or why, but it's what I noticed about the, you know, at that time. Yeah, because I mean, Joe worked at, you know, Joe Camico worked at William, so, you know, I'm sure maybe he had some friends there still. So deep. So very well being. Right. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Maybe this should be off the record, but I've even heard that Larry DeMar was on like Joe's bowling team and that there was always kind of like this rumor in the background that Larry was feeding Joe stuff kind of under the table. You know, while he was, you know, while Larry was obviously at Williams. I heard that rumor. I remember that. I can't, again, I can't. There's no verification of any of that, you know. Oh, absolutely none. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just one of those industry rumors, but nobody, you know, obviously nobody ever could prove something like that. You know, but that just curious. But anyways, then after Slugfest, you did fishtails, which was, you know, frankly, you hit the ball out of the park on fishtails. I mean, that game, you know, like I'm in Michigan and, you know, we've got, you know, we're one of those states that's got, we got lakes everywhere. And I swear to God, everybody that's got a house on the lake once fishtails. You know, that game is so popular. Yeah, it's one of the toughest games to play too, you know. What do you mean? Well, it's really fast. It's just really, there's a lot of mean shots in that game. There's some nasty roll downs. There's some mean kick-pulse. I frankly, I was really surprised at it, but it did as well as it did because it was so tough to stand and sell with people like, you know, there was the rules where relatively simple. I mean, if you could make, not you could do really well, but sometimes you would just, I myself, to this day, I struggled to make shots on that game. I'm like, Martin, you widened. Why didn't you do that, you know? Just one of those things you could look through, I guess. But, you know, that game had probably the smoothest development cycle of any I ever worked on. It just went really, really smooth. We had a really good team. Tavik Manon, Art, I had Scott Sloan-Miani doing the dots at that time. That was one of his first games, I believe. So, a lot of guys were really, you know, confident to do great stuff trying to make their mark and video on guys like Eugene Geer. He was another guy that was doing dots on that game, Mark Pinocchio programmed it. It's just a great team. I mean, one thing's going to really well, you know, you don't forget it. And it's just one, they're getting one together smoothly. I didn't have a lot of problems with, you know, everything seemed to melt nicely right out of the day. It was a project to work on. We just had a blast, you know. Now, was the fish on top of the the backbox? Was he ever designed to actually, you know, speak like, you know, like a Billy Bass? No, no. There was talk about that. We considered it, but, you know, the big thing there was, you know, in an arcade setting, you can't really, you can't rely on speeds or anything audio to do anything more than just a sort of a sideline, you know, special effect. You can't really do anything with the rules. And I think one of the ideas was that fish was going to tell you what to shoot at, you know, and I mean, the important information from the open, the left ramp or whatever. That was the idea I had for it. But we never, we just thought, you know, we're going to waste the audio on that. Let's just make it shake the whole damn game. That would be, that would be exciting. So we had this whole like vibration thing going on whenever the solenoid would go off. When it was cantered up on top of the backbox, it created this like huge springboard, you know, which nobody knew at the time that was going to happen. But when we thought that we went, hey, forgive the speech, this is great. You know what I mean? This is a much cooler effect and we're going to get much more bounce for the back on that. Now why did that game, if that game was such a, you know, a tough shot game? Why did it go with the slightly shorter lightning flippers opposed to the standard ones? You were an educated man. I'll tell you why. That was a game was enjoying extreme popularity in France of all places. And France wanted lower game times. They wanted us to, they wanted us to make a tougher. And you know, they were pretty much calling the shots on what we were doing at that point. And a gentleman by the name, I'll have a second. Remember this, Demetri Kikules, who was our representative. He was a, he worked for distributor in France, our biggest one. And I think it was DDA, Salmone, Miranda. I don't remember the name of the PSD. What was the name of the company? So he would come out during, as we were like working on the game in the last, you know, usually in the final three, four weeks of the game before prototype, he'd come out and tell you what he wanted for, because we already been prototyping the game out there. So he had one and he would come back with all these ideas. And he says, we want to hit short in the flippers. We want you to put shorter flippers on it for our market. And we thought, you know, we're going to do not listen to this guy. He's going to take 3,000 games out of the game. Sure, we'll put shorter flippers on it for you. No problem. So we did that. And he actually helped us determine what the length was going to be. And you know, I was going to move the flippers back and do some other things, but it was going to screw up the shot line to do my style. That was out of the question. So we ended up, we ended up, I think, I want to say those, those were about three, 16th to 3 eighths of an inch shorter than the standard flipper. I don't remember exactly, but that was a big deal. And we kind of, we had to listen to this guy. Obviously he was big money, you know, because in the end, it is a business. No matter what, it's a business. You can't move side of that. It's really hard for me to fathom, though, anybody in France telling us what to do. I'm going to start striking Mark. I forget it. I got filled with he does very well over there still. So now, why did the US game ship with the shorter flippers too, though? That was, I think that was just an inventory decision. We just kind of thought how bad it's going to be. You know, we didn't. It's hard to know how big of a problem that can cause unless you see it on a couple hundred games. And at the time, you know, I played the game and played it and played it and played it with those short flippers. And I thought things would be fine. You know, I had no idea that it was going to come out the way it did. And, you know, it made things a lot more difficult. Probably just a question of myself getting used to something that I probably shouldn't have gotten used to, you know, because you're looking at it every day or staring at it, and you think, okay, this is all right. It's not so bad. I can stand the saddle. I can hit shots. What's the problem? I mean, but what I think is not what everybody else thinks. So, I think clearly that was, if I had the, if I had the sense that it was going to be that big of a problem, I would have never let it happen. Not for the stakes. I would have, we would have found a way to make sure that all United States games got standard flippers, you know. It is a regret because I'll tell you what my game here in the basement has standard flippers on it. Yeah, my, my fish tails has standard flippers too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, do you have a, do you have a lot of games in your basement? No, I don't actually. I have Indiana Jones and I have fish tails. That's about it. And speaking of which, Indiana Jones, now that was another one that you just totally hit out of the park. And now, Indiana Jones being a wide body game and being a big, big theme. I mean, a big license. Now, how did you get that license? I mean, that's a killer opportunity that you got to work on that game, right? Totally. Totally. It was the best opportunity I ever had. Thanks to Roger Schabb and some other people who really, who really went out there and made it happen, Doug Watson. I had a lot of help with that game. There was no question. Let me get it, you know, I just had some really sharp ties that were doing a lot of the, a lot of the implementation and rules work in the background. Doug Watson, who sort of just took on, you know, not only the art, but came up with a lot of the rules and the packaging of the game and the concept of sort of blending all three movies that was, that was all of us, but Doug really made it happen. He came up with the titles and did just did a lot of outstanding work on that game. Brian Eddy was another guy who, you know, that was the first game known from that, the new ball trough. Right. That was Brian's baby. Brian kind of took that. He said to me at one point, the development says, this is I really think that we need to redesign this ball trough system. It's a pile of shit and I'm not going to make another game with it. I went, we're okay. You know, how we're going to fit that into the budget? He goes, well, we should, what we should do is find a way to fit it into all budgets. It shouldn't cost us. It should, it should be part of every game made from henceforth. And that was a brilliant idea and at that time we weren't making that way. And, you know, I certainly wasn't. And so Brian did a lot to make that happen, did a lot of the engineering work on that and kind of did it as a sideline project along with the programming of