hello everyone this is alan from the wedgehead pinball podcast coming at you with a special solo episode this week. My normal co-host, Alex the Waterboy, he is out sick, so I'm going to be doing a solo episode for you here, and hopefully we can get back to recording some full episodes with the both of us sometime soon. That being said, I wanted this episode, I feel like this was a good time to tackle an issue or tackle what some feedback I've gotten from some of the listeners who said that they really liked the show, but they felt like they weren't maybe the target audience and some new players or some people that are pinball curious. And they were like, we don't really understand some of the terms you guys use. And then I had to check myself after playing pinball for the last 15 or so years and realize, oh yeah, there's a lot of weird verbiage that has just become invisible to myself or to long-term pinball players or pinball heads. So I think I want to go make this episode a quick kind of rundown of sort of like different common pinball terminologies and sort of give a quick definition of them. And then that way you can always have an episode that we can reference back to. Maybe it'll be a good starting point episode for people who are totally new to the hobby and don't understand pinball terminology. So I want to get this one done. it seemed like the week to do it as a solo episode since it's kind of just me running down a list of terms that I made and I'll be kind of giving a quick definition of each. I hope you all enjoy it even the regular kind of pinball heads. I hope maybe you'll get something out of it or disagree with me on how something should be defined or whatever. I think we should start with at least from the first few episodes I know words that got specifically mentioned to me and I think a lot of them have to do with eras. I think the first era is electro-mechanical, but WIT is often sort of shortened to EM, the letters EM. And anytime you hear us say EM or anyone say EM, that means electro-mechanical. And what that basically means is this is before circuit boards. So they had bells and chimes or score reels. And before even score reels, they just had lights that would light up and there'd be numbers in the back of the game. And that's how you kept score. but that's what we're referring to as EM. Our name, Wedgehead, is actually taken from a nickname given to a certain manufacturer, Gottlieb. They made a lot of single-player games that they had a very distinctive slanted kind of backbox, and it was wedge-shaped. So they would call those games, affectionately, they were known as Wedgeheads. So when we went into our building and we had a triangular, weird-shaped building that turns into a wedge, I thought it was a perfect name. which is sort of the history of that name, for those of you that are wondering that never knew that. The others is, you might hear something called a wood rail. Wood rail is a type of EM, so it's an old game, and these are the earliest EMS, and this is before they used, you believe it or not, they used wood instead of metal on the sides of the machines to hold the glass in place. So those are wood instead of metal, and those are referred to as wood rails, right? And then after that we get into the solid state era uh sometimes referred to as the alphanumeric era uh basically this was when solid state electronics were taking over you can call even modern games today they're technically solid state but nobody refers to them as such this is usually from the era like 79 to about 1989 so about that decade when it became feasible to manufacture pinball machines and and other things, but pinball is what we're talking about on the pinball podcast, but it's where they have circuit boards, they have computers, they have logic boards and drivers, and just modern electronics were available. So instead of everything being done in the EM era with cams and relays and switches, which I know those are a lot of different terms, and I don't want to get this into an electrical or an electronics definition podcast, one, because I'm not qualified. I don't think that's very exciting to listen to. Basically, think about it like modern games have computers, and that's how they track scoring. They hold pieces of software or code, which is how they do light shows, and they do all the different things that make a pinball machine work, right? Back in the day, they didn't have that. So when we refer to solid state, it could mean up to the modern era, but it never does. What people mean when they say solid state game is they mean games from roughly 1979 to about 1989. It just means that the games no longer have bells, chimes, they have electronic sounds, they have electronic scoring, and their displays where they show the score are no longer reels. They are now, you know, like what you would see on an old alarm clock, you know, where they have sort of those segmented digits that we call alphanumeric or alphanumeric displays. And sort of after that, this is another one that I had a lot of people, I realized that we say a lot, that we shorten a lot. And so I want to kind of describe this next kind of era of pinball. And it's DMD. That's short for dot matrix display, which is again referring to the display in a pinball machine. So where you see your scores, the dot matrix display changed a lot in pinball because it went from the alphanumeric that preceded it. And it sort of coincided, not perfectly, because there were some games and there was a period where they kind of were in flux a little bit. But what people usually refer to it as, they like to use DMD or dot matrix display to refer to an era. And that era is sort of kind of really still what you have now. It's all the games pretty much have modes starting in the DMD era, you know, or they get modes, they get ramps, they get multiballs. There were a few in the solid state era, like I was saying, that sort of bleed across the lines. But just in general, like if you're playing a pinball machine, if you're playing an Addams Family or you're playing a brand new Godzilla, right? Like those all have they're very similar as far as like what they can offer. They all have modes, ramps, toys, multiballs. And I'll describe each of those things here in a second as well in further detail. But that's the DMD era. it refers to the display as dot matrix display, which means all the animations are done in little dots or like little pixels. They were orange, sometimes red, you know, the stern ones were red, and then now they make them in color and all that sort of stuff. But anytime you see pixelated art, that's a dot matrix display, and we refer to those as DMDs, but it's typically referring to an era, which is sort of like from, you know, 1990 to about 2012. And the last is the modern era. Sometimes we refer to this again as sort of like the LCD era, which, as you probably know, phone screens, televisions, LCD, right? So those started in 2013. Jersey Jack Pinball made Wizard of Oz and sort of changed the standard for the industry. So now it wasn't dots anymore. It felt outdated. So now they're using little, you know, modern LCD screens. All right. Next up, I think I should probably cover some more of the pieces of the machines and the playfield parts. When you say cabinet, cabinet is like the body of the machine, the big, long, outer wood cabinet body. And you put it on legs, and that's how it stands up. The backbox is the thing that's up top at the top of the pinball machine, furthest away from you when you're playing. that will host any display, whether it was score reels back in the day with the EMs or DMD or the alphanumerics of the solid state in the DMD era or the new LCD screens. We call that the backbox. So the thing that stands up and you look for your scores at. It also typically has a big piece of art that's illuminated from the back. So that's the backbox. And where the art sits on, we refer to as a back glass. That's because back in the day, these things were made of glass and they had art sort of reverse screen printed onto the backs of them and then lights would shine through them illuminating it. They still do the same thing now, except nowadays they're not made out of glass. So they're referred to as trans lights because they're typically on, you know, plastic or like a plexiglass type material. And they usually have a separate sheet, you know, paper that they print the art on, that the light shines through it. Again, it sort of changes over time, but the common nomenclature is still back glass. So you may still hear people refer to things like, oh, I really like the Deadpool back glass. You know, you can be a pedantic little ass if you want and be like, oh, I'm actually, that's Translight, but whatever. People refer to it as a back glass. That's what a classic really is. And you can call it one way or the other, even if you're talking about a modern game. Flippers, right? That's what you hit the ball with. I don't know if I need to really explain basic flippers other than modern flippers. They've been this way since sort of the mid-70s. You start to see sort of the common full-size flipper now. They're three inches. In our first episode, we covered lightning flippers, which are a special eighth of an inch shorter between the two of them. So creating a flipper gap that's an eighth of an inch wider, I guess. And you can hear more about lightning flippers and how divisive they are still to this day in our first episode of the podcast but then there's also flippers that bally made in the mid-80s that they did on some games that are slightly longer so they're sort of like the reverse they're sort of the lightning flippers but they're a little bit longer than the standard some people call those carrot flippers because of their shape and they got kind of notches on them so the lightning flippers have little lightning bolts on them bally carrot flippers sort of have these like sort of notches these notch lines down them and those are just a little bit longer but by and large pretty much everything from the mid 70s on for the most part are all three inch flippers with some exceptions but before this when you're still in the em era you had two inch flippers that was the standard so much shorter much very small flippers and the other interesting one i think is well there were banana flippers which were these like curved like kind of high lie shapes these little boomerang these little banana shapes so they call them banana flippers those were on a couple games those are those were a novelty experiment that they did as well disco fever time warp atom i think but other than that you won't see those but what you will see on williams games were something called zipper flippers and those are basically like the two inch flippers but designer Ted Zale sort of created them as a mech where they would zip together so you would typically hit like a bumper or something on the play field and the flippers would close so they close the gap so they'd be they come in together and there's some cool games that have that the one i like the most is probably nip it which is you know alligator themed and a fun fact is that's the first game that is in the background on the tv show happy days that they're playing that's what the fonz is playing is a nip it actually changed later on in the show, but for all intents and purposes, it's a nip it, has zipper flippers on it. It's a cool feature and it's a lot of fun, but I think that covers flippers more or less. In other terms, you might hear are ramps. Ramps should be self-explanatory. Anything that looks like a ramp that takes the ball up a level in the play field and they typically come back to your flippers. That's a ramp. People get mad if a game doesn't have a ramp in the modern era, but it was very, you know, they are, you started to see them pop up. Games would have a single ramp and that was considered a feature in the mid 80s games like xenon or sorcerer there that's like the one ramp error and it was a big deal now people typically expect two at the minimum sometimes up to three or four but they're fun they change sort of the pace of the game and they give elevation to the game the other thing you'll hear a lot is orbit so an orbit is just a shot it's typically around the outside so the furthest shot or the furthest shot to the to the left or the right that comes all the way around. So if you shoot a shot on the edge and it loops all the way around, technically an orbit doesn't have to be the furthest shot. It can be one shot in or whatever, but it basically comes out like an orbit, like a planet's orbit. You shoot the ball, it goes around the shot and it comes back the other way. So that's an orbit. A spinner is a target that you hit that is on an axis and then activates a switch. So typically spinners are most often placed in modern pinball, they're placed on orbit. So those far shots, because the ball gets moving, gets a chance to kind of cook through the spinner and it'll flip around and it'll hit the switch multiple times and it'll score for every time target kind of spins around. They were introduced, you know, they were a staple of EMs into the solid state era, you know, light the spinner. You know, it starts off being worth small points. You light it. Maybe it's worth 100 points. Now it's worth a thousand or whatever. But they're very cool. They're still using pinball today. They're pretty much everyone's favorite common pinball part, I would say. And unlike pop bumpers, they're still popular. They're still used to great effect in modern games. Then we get into things that sort of stop the ball, like a saucer. So a saucer is like started in older games. Like you would think, like it's like a soft or like a spoon shaped kind of divot out of the play field that the ball can fall into, sit there, hit a switch, you know, kicks it out of there. Then what we get to later is a scoop, which is the same concept, but it's usually below the playfield. So it's, you know, it's just, it falls into a hole in the playfield. And then the way it kicks it back out, because it can go into the playfield and it can roll underneath, because there could be a path under the playfield, which we call a subway, where the ball disappears from play and pops up somewhere else. Or it can just go in and then pop right back out. But anytime, anywhere it pops out of, we call a vertical up kicker, or you'll hear it called a VUK, or some people will call it a VUK. So I think Alex has referred to a VUK in the past on the podcast that people were confused about, but that's what it is. Vertical up kicker, ball goes into a scoop, pops up and back out. So Ghostbusters, Attack from Mars, a million games have them. Almost every game has one in this day and age, the modern day. the next thing you have are the big triangles above your flippers these are called slingshots they have kickers in them when the ball hits one it fires and you'll get a lot of fun interaction above the flippers where it'll kickback and forth and slingshots are really the best way to make a game harder to control so you know there's a lot of debate and the way people set up games and whatnot but you know we have a reputation for setting our games up hard really that just means we keep the slings tight we keep the sling we rebuild the slings when they start to get weak and it'll cause a ball to graze them and kind of fire a cracker back and forth some players don't like the extra challenge or whatever and they'll bitch about that but slingshots are crucial otherwise you'd play a game of pinball forever so it gives a randomizing effect above the flippers makes the game fun harder to control etc the next thing we're going to talk about are drop targets well we should talk about stand-up targets that's any target that you hit and it recognize it so a target is just a switch so you hit a big plastic piece and then it moves backwards and it hits the switch and so it knows that you hit a target and those are stand-up targets they come in different shapes sizes colors whatever but what a drop target is is it's targets that pop up from under the playfield and when you hit they sort of fall down into the playfield these were really popular in got leaves got leave made some great ones in the em era they still use them a day, but they're not as, I don't know, like they're not, they're sort of like an afterthought nowadays. I still think they're one of the coolest mechs that we don't really utilize in the modern day anymore. They're expensive to produce is what I've heard George Gomez over at Stern say, but I just think they don't make them, they don't make them valuable like they used to. You know, we have Atlantis on the floor, Gottlieb Atlantis, it's a wedgehead currently, and that has a huge row of drop targets on the left side. And they're actually one of my favorite features on those old games. I really like those old Gottlieb wedge heads with a lot of drop targets. The next thing is probably the most misunderstood or commonly complained about feature on a pinball machine, and that's a magnet. Again, this is self-explanatory. A pinball is a metal ball. It can be controlled by a magnet. A magnet can change the trajectory or can grab and hold the ball. But Adam's family kind of famously had hidden magnets under the play field that they called the power so you you would have a ball and it would just grab it right and throw it across iron man has it there's a few games that have it but really not as many as you think you know guardians of the galaxy has a hidden magnet but what happens is people will misjudge a ball spinning or bouncing off something and go oh you know they turned up the magnets on this one oh they're screwing me with these fucking magnets you know but really most games don't have magnets under the playfield to screw you. If they do have magnets, they're usually to grab and hold a ball for a feature. Yeah, but it's a common scapegoat for people that don't really kind of know better, and it really has a lot to do with Pat Lawler, who's a famous pinball designer who designed Addams Family because that game was so popular and they made the best-selling pinball machine of all time. That game was ubiquitous, and that game would do that. So now everyone thinks that any weird bounce or spin that got put on a ball is due to some magnet force under the playfield. this is more on the technical side but coils when you hear coils or solenoids that's basically just how things move under the play field so if you're talking to someone that you know plays pinball or fixes pinball machines and they say coil or solenoid those are interchangeable terms for the same thing these are electromagnets but they basically just grab something and slam it down when a when an electrical current is run through them that's how everything in a pinball machine moves. You know, there are a couple motors. Motors are used sparingly because they're not as reliable. Coils are very reliable, and they're cheap, and they deliver, you know, fast and snappy power. So, pretty much everything that moves in a pill machine, controlled by a coil or a solenoid. And, you know, flippers, pop-upers, big toys, whatever, which we can all get to next. Anything that sort of moves or changes state can be called a mech. Sometimes these are also called toys. Toys are mechs, right? So think about the castle in Medieval Madness, that we refer to as a mech, even though it has multiple coils to move the castle gate up and down, you know, and the drawbridge up and down, and when you destroy the castle, it kind of gives that crazy animation where the turrets move. We call that a mech, right? Or the building in Godzilla, or the trunk in Theater of Magic. Any of those things are mechs. They can also be called toys, and they're really what makes a certain pinball machine distinctive, right? Typically these things only happen on that one game or they only happen in that way on that one game. So they're often talked about by pinball players. And, you know, I think a lot of the best ones were probably done in the 1990s in the DMD era by Bally Williams, especially. Another term you might hear is sculpt. Sculpt just means a sculpted plastic, you know, like a 3D plastic. A lot of times in pinball machines, you'll see flat plastics that have art printed on them around the playfield or whatever uh but a sculpt is they took the time to sculpt something so if you see the sparky in metallica that's you know a sculpted 3d plastic guy in an electric chair that's what they're talking about is sculpts and people typically want more sculpts you know because it helps with the world under glass which is the next term when you hear people talk about world under glass it just means kind of all the window dressing right it's what's the little world like under the glass think my favorite game white water is a perfect example it has all those sculpts of the mountains you know it has the yeti who a toy or right and they just sort of come together and the art all comes together to create to paint a very vivid world under glass You feel like you're on the river, you're rafting, you know, there's this Yeti monster, there's the crazy 90s humor. You're with Wet Willie who's sort of like a Willy Wonka psycho character, but the world under glass is there. They got like little details that make it seem more vivid, right? And then we also have Plunger. that's where you pull back and it has a spring and it hits the ball up the play field and into play you know nowadays they also have auto launchers or button launcher some games have a gun or tails from the crypt have like a weird like kind of door handle you know knocker that you would press but uh they're all the same thing and even on games that only have buttons people still call it a plunger or a plunge right and then we also have rubbers this should be self-explanatory as well, right? All the stuff that's on the flippers, on everything that the ball bounces against. Historically, we're all rubber. Nowadays, you have multiple options like polyurethane and silicone and stuff like that, but they're still typically referred to as rubber. Then now I think we get into some common skills, I guess, let's say, or terminology went for playing pinball. I started with plunge, so I'll say soft plunge. Soft plunge is where you intentionally plunge short of maybe the main objective or going all the way around to the top typically because there's like an upper flipper and you want to plunge just above it so that you get a clean shot off that upper flipper to start the game then there's the common term nudge nudge just means touching the game kind of moving it with your hands moving the cabinet the side of the cabinet and kind of bumping the ball if you nudge too hard you will get a tilt warning and then if you get you shake it too many times Like in modern games, the standard is you get two tilt warnings on the third one you tilt. In old games like EMs, the second you hit that, there is no warning. It's just tilt. Tilting a game is not nudging a game. Tilting a game is failing to nudge properly, right? You're nudging until you tilt. The tilt is a failure to nudge. So if that makes sense. I think that's a very commonly misused term that people don't, you know, they're like, oh, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to tilt the machine. Nobody wants to tilt the machine, okay? You know, you're trying to nudge without tilting. Then there's, you know, there's the standard tilt, but then there's also a slam tilt. And a slam tilt is when you smash kind of the coin door where the coins go in. There's another sensor on there that will trigger a slam tilt. So if you kind of kick or knee the machine or whatever, that's a slam tilt. Then we get into some stuff like a slap save. Slap save is very common, probably the most common skill that you're going to want to learn as a player. and that's where you hit one flipper and then the other flipper button in short succession after it's typically to save a ball going straight down the middle you slap the cabinet you can get just the tip of one flipper on it and then you immediately you know it kind of bounces it just enough over to the other side you just get the tip on it and you smack it up out of the way back into safety that's what we've referred to as a slap save and then we have sort of the band moves the moves that will get you kicked the fuck out of wedgehead if i see you doing them is the death save or the bang back and this is where our ball goes down the outlanes the far side drains and it's rolling down and there are moves where you can kind of kick and shove and push a machine and kind of pop the ball back up from underneath the flippers just above the drain and back into play it's not allowed in tournaments and to do it successfully on old kind of 90s games you know it's a pretty violent move so most operators don't fucking like it myself included and it's it's not tournament legal and honestly even if it was your game and you and you think it's fair game or whatever it's just a weak ass move that you're not allowed to do it in tournament and really you're just handicapping yourself and your future growth as a player you want to get good don't even learn them don't even fucking do them you know end of story uh we'll do a whole episode on death saves and bang backs and all that kind of shit later because i think there's a lot of meat on those bones. Again, that's another divisive thing. Some players think it's just part of the game. It's just a skill or whatever. Obviously, I disagree, but that'll be a good episode in and of itself that we'll do at a later time. Then we get things like drop catches or live catches. These are basically like the reverse of the other. Drop catches, usually a ball's coming out your flipper. You hold the flipper up, and then you release the flipper the second it hits the flipper, and it kind of deadens the momentum and kind of squats down on the flipper. A live catch is your flippers at rest and you flip just as it's coming up and you kind of dead in the momentum with a flip and then the benefit of a live catch is now you're in a cradle we call or a trap that's where you're holding a ball on one flipper that's it or multiple balls if you're in a multiball then we have post pass post pass just means you're in a cradle like i said ball on one of your flippers and you sort of kind of tap the flipper button it bounces up off the bottom of the slingshot post and kind of rolls back and across the flipper gap to the other flipper it's a great way to kind of pass i think it's the easiest one to learn but then there are things like a tap pass or an in-lane pass which is where it's rolling down the tip of the flipper and a tap pass is especially on solid state games you can just sort of kind of instead of pressing the flipper button you can just kind of tap it right and it'll just give it a little soft flip which will just pop the ball up and over so instead of hitting a shot up the play field it'll just give it enough juice to just kind of pop it over an in-lane pass is the same concept but on a more modern game you sort of let it roll to the very tip of the flipper and then you just sort of hit your flip and it'll roll up the in lane and the in lane is just what it sounds it's the lane that leads to your flippers it's in so it's next to the slingshot you have plastic or metal guides the ball rolls in rolls down towards your flipper right those are inlanes the lanes that are next to those are outlanes and those are the ones that go to the drain pretty self-explanatory another thing you'll hear players say with inlanes and passing and all that kind of stuff is shatzing or shatzing the in lane that's named after a famous old school pinball player neil shatz he's sort of credited with creating this uh where a lot of times the inlanes and outlanes you can kind of move with the flipper button you can spell things out and so they'll score things or they'll be valuable or they'll start like a shot multiplier or whatever it's very it's very useful on a game like alien star which is an old solid state premiere god leap solid state awesome game we have one that needs to come back in but if you can if you can shats that in lane and then hit the spinner you're partying okay but that's that's why you might want to do that or learn that skill it's very difficult to do it's definitely an advanced skill but definitely very doable and fittingly named after the man that sort of invented it made it famous all right jackpot right everyone understands what a jackpot is it's a shot that's worth a lot of points although modern sterns multi balls they're not worth a lot of points let's say that right like everything's lit they're not worth a lot back in the day jackpot used to mean jackpot and it used to mean something it's been a little bit devalued nowadays but they still call them jackpots whatever mystery mystery just means it's a mystery award so typically you go into a whole scoop saucer and the game gives you a random award right out of a set of a few different ones hurry up is any shot where it's lit a shot is lit for a certain value and typically starts counting down and you either have that much amount of time to hit that shot for those points but even more commonly it starts at a high value and it starts going down in value very quickly until it gets to nothing so it's just a way for a game to emphasize a certain shot within a certain time period combo that's where you hit one shot and then another shot right off each other Steve Ritchie's famous for his combos and putting those kind of into pinball machines this is what we term flow play game that wants you to play with flow means hit one shot then another shot then another shot and so a lot of games will reward you for combos and combo play bonus is your after ball like once you drain you get a bonus based on things you did every game's different as what counts to what bonus they're really valuable in solid state games and EM games used to be like a really big deal. Many modern games, they don't matter quite so much, but you get points at the end of your ball, provided you don't tilt. You know, if you tilt on that ball, it's going to take away your bonus. And then we have a multiplier. Multipliers used to be reserved mostly for bonuses. So you would get, you know, your bonus, you know, times two or three or four or whatever. But nowadays it's, they still do it on bonuses, but really what you see a lot now are playfield multipliers so either a shot is multiplied for the rest of the ball or the whole playfields times two or times three or four or whatever for a set period of time wizard mode these are a mode right a mode is just something that gives you set rules or objectives within a certain time frame you know most modern games have that that's why people people like a lot of modern games just because they they get into things and there's different modes that forces them to hit different types of shots but usually if you beat enough of these modes or do enough of these objectives in the game you'll get to you know like in a video game it's the boss fight right that's the wizard mode in pinball named because you got to be a pinball wizard to get there you know some wizard modes are fairly easy to get to some are really really difficult they started sort of popping up in the 90s during the dmd era tour the mansion and adam's family by getting through all the mansion rooms rule the universe right and attack from mars um you know which is defending every city from the martian invasion plus other objectives you know and then there's wet willies and white water if you get all the raft if you collect all the rafts all the way up you go into wet willies right and that's the wizard mode you know and then modern new pinball machines typically have multiple wizard modes so they're they're being uh programmed to play longer or have more deep objectives because a lot of people are buying pinball machines for their house versus they used to always be made for location first and foremost You know then we have multi That one should be self anytime multiple balls are on the play field that a multi lock lock is for multiball so lock is always progress for a multiball the first kind of game that really gets credited with it there's some ems that uh you know ballet star jump or whatever um or even ems where you can push all five of your balls out on the same time you're like technically that's a multiball but as far as like a multiball mode and where the term lock comes from is Steve Ritchie's game Firepower where you would physically lock a ball in three separate saucers on the playfield then when you lock the final one they would kick them all out and you'd be in a multiball mode and then through the solid state era into the 90s a lot of times they kept physical ball locks but they also started doing kind of what they call virtual ball locks and that's what you'll see a lot of now most balls are virtually locked like you'll hit it in there it'll go ball locked and back in the day it used to be like balls physically on the play field you can see it is physically locked now most of the time it's like ball locked it'll give you the animation and it'll kick that same ball back at you and you sort of have to keep track in your head or you can see it on the display or whatever but it's not physically locked in a space they still do sometimes and a lot of times it'll be on a higher level model of a stern machine let's say or whatever but that's locks right and the kickback it's the same sort of thing you got this also on firepower get on like high speed you get sort of the left this is the left outline you get on whitewater right there's like there's a coil back there and it rolls over that outline switch when that kickback is lit And instead of going all the way down the drain, it fires outwards and pushes your ball back into play. Those were called kickbacks. Again, that's another Steve Ritchie thing that he created. Came ubiquitous. But to save a little bit of money, a lot of times nowadays, you know, almost all kickbacks now are all virtual. So if the lane is lit, you'll see something that's like a light that's lit that says kickback or ball save or whatever it says, you know. and that just means if it drains it'll kick a new ball into the shooter lane and usually auto plunge it for you and that's the last thing ball save right so the old games used to plunge and if it would kind of bounce off of something bounce off some targets or pop bumper or sling and then go into the outland and drain that's just how it was they call those house balls right because the house always wins but you know starting in the 90s they started programming in ball save so you would get at least 10 seconds or 15 seconds or whatever of time once you plunge that no matter what happened to the ball would give you another one and there's probably some other terms that you may need to know our boutique again we did another episode on this but it was basically just talking about boutique manufacturers these are like spooky pinball american pinball dutch pinball they're just small run manufacturers and listen to that episode if you want to learn a little bit more about them. The term operator, that's sort of like an operator is like what my business partner, Chris Rhodes, is. He operates pinball machines and also can be arcade cabinets or whatever, pool tables, jukeboxes. An operator is someone that operates amusement devices. So if you go to a bar or a laundromat, most of the time those bars or those laundromats or whatever, they don't own those machines that are in there. The amusement devices, like if they have a buck hunter or a pool table, jukebox, pinball machine. It's usually an operator that buys those, puts those in, and then gives a split with that business. Then you have sort of bigger arcades, like we own and operate our own games, you know, so a lot of times a bigger arcade that you would know or go to in your local area, they probably own and operate their own games. But if you just walk into a random bar and there's something there, typically those are not owned by that business, but they're operated by somebody else. A distributor is sort of like a car dealership or a car dealer, if that makes sense. You rarely buy games brand new from the manufacturer themselves, although a lot of boutiques will still sell straight through or whatever. But if you're buying from like Stern, you're buying through a distributor almost all the time. You know, they're just a big company and they get regionality, just like a kind of a car dealership, right like stern gives out so many in so many regions you know we buy from a big company called bets in that's our distributor that's where we get to buy our new games from uh manufacturer people that make the games right stern pinball tristie jack pinball the boutiques like spooky american dutch pinball those are all manufacturers mods or anything that didn't come with the game some of them are like extra lighting or art blades or mirror blades which are things on the sides of the play field where they, you know, just add extra art or they put mirrors, but they could be little toys, little features. There's a whole community that mods pinball machines and they sell little toys or add-on kits, you know, online. Jazz your games up a little bit if you're that type of person. We have video modes, which are little video games aside pinball. Just lo and behold, we've done another episode on that too. So check out our episode on video modes if you want to learn more about them. Virtual pinball, that just means a cabinet. I mean, it could be something that you play on your phone, it could be something you play on your PlayStation, or it could be it built in a pinball cabinet with a backbox on legs with flipper buttons and everything, but it's a big TV screen and it runs virtual video game pinball. So no coils, no physical mechs, just a video game version of pinball in a pinball cabinet. Grand champ means you have the number one overall high score on that machine it's usually a big deal and they're highly sought after probably the most fun about playing on location is trying to steal a grand champ score or competing with your friends or a grand champ score then when we talk about designers we're talking about Steve Ritchie right pat lawler Keith Elwin of the modern day those those the people that set up the shots build the game kind of lay out all the shots physically some of them have more say than others about how they want the rules to go or whatever, but they're like a director of a movie. Then you have the coders. Famous ones are Lyman Sheets, Dwight Sullivan, people like that. And they're sort of there to create the code, program the code, or the rules, or the rule sets. So they do the things like they program light shows, and then they also make sure stuff fires when you hit this button, this flipper fires, things like that. but they also typically get credit for the rules, like, you know, hit this this many times, you start this mode, things like that. The designer is sort of credited like a director in a movie, and sort of the coder, I would say, is sort of like the DP, the director of photography. They both have to work together, and together they sort of, even though it's still a team full of electrical and mechanical engineers and so many other people and art and all that kind of stuff, they're sort of the two main driving creative forces of the machine and how it's going to play when you get to play it in the wild. And, you know, as far as like rule sets go, the last thing I'll talk about is just sort of like when you hear people describe a rule set or code, you know, code and rule set are sort of used interchangeably. And they'll say things like, oh, that's deep or it's shallow. So deep means like you think it means. And shallow means like you think it means. Shallow means it's simple or there's not a lot to it, right? It's shallow is typically used as a derogatory thing, although I don't see why it shouldn't have to be. It could be a simple games can be very fun. They can be very like just one more, one more, one more. Right. Like, you know exactly what to do. There's not a lot of surprises. Deep code. You know, it's also exactly what you think it means. It is deep. Lots of levels, lots to discover, lots of different stuff, multiple choices. Right. So like a shallow game would be something like Terminator 2, an early DMD game from 1991 versus Stern's Godzilla. Just trying to give you guys two examples. That's an example of a very deep game with lots to do, multiple wizard modes, new stuff to see, right? And they're still kind of changing it and tweaking it. But as far as games you might see in the wild, like people will typically go, oh yeah, Terminator 2. That's a fun game, but it's shallow. Godzilla, that's a fun game, but it's very deep. I think that's about everything I kind of had written down that I wanted to cover. I know some of these things are better seen. You may not listen to. It was just something that I wanted to get this episode done and I wanted it to get into the feed because I did hear your feedback or some of y'all's feedback where you were like, oh, we really are enjoying the show and we're learning a lot and we're really happy to listen to it. You know, we feel like we're not the target audience and I don't want that to be the case at all. I want this to be a podcast that anyone that's into pinball, whether you're brand new or a veteran, can listen to it. And I think part of that was just getting these kind of descriptions of common terminology, you know, kind of out there so that we can always reference it. We can always tell people, hey, you know, if you're just you're new to pinball and you're checking out the podcast because you're excited, maybe start with this episode first. something that we can always point to kind of help people out and then it'll make your enjoyment of all the other episodes richer for it that's it thanks for sitting with me through this podcast it was a little bit weird doing it by myself talking to myself in a room but I hope you all enjoyed it until next time you know go play some pinball go play some pinball on location you know try something else out if you heard some of the skills like a nudge or a tap pass or a dead bounce or dead flip. Oh, I don't even know if I covered dead flip. Dead flip is where you just let the ball hit the flipper, bounce right over to the other side. Can't believe I missed that one. Anyway, I'm glad I'm saying it in the outro. Go out and play some pinball. That's the end of this episode. That's the end of every episode. Go find some pinball. Go out and play it. That's what this is all about at the end of the day. Until next time, good luck. Don't suck.