Hey, howdy, hey, campers. Don's Pinball Podcast back. Episode 221. This is an interview episode with the guys over at Scorbit. I came into this ignorant of the technology, and now I'm in awe of its potential. We're going to get into that here in just a little bit, but first the drop. Ooh, Double Drop, what's up everybody? Welcome back here to the year of our Pinball 2025 as it comes to a close and a conclusion. In a recent episode, I kind of waxed ecstatic about this interactive connectivity of pinball and how I see it as a precipice of something great, kind of like the launch of the Xbox Live back in, what was it, 2002 or something, where all of a sudden, boom, we were connected like never before, right? And I think that has finally caught up here to pinball, where it's not just a solo, solitary experience in the bar by yourself. If you can't be with a group of friends, at least you can compete online, man. What if we could trash talk each other? What if we could sabotage each other's games? I think that's all on the horizon. And there's several companies now on the precipice of bringing this to us. That's two precipices you got today. So in addition to Stearns Insider Connected with its achievements and what we see with Hexa and Turner, we have Scorbit, who have been nose to the grindstone for the last 15 to 20 years, working on a way to not only bring modern games into the interactive connectivity fruition, but also older games. And I'm talking about, you know, Adam's Family and beyond. and they figured out ways to get these to interface in a way that I didn't really fully comprehend. And here I'm presenting in its entirety my conversation with Brian O'Neill, Ron Richards, and Jay Adelson of Scorebit. I'm Don. I do a pinball podcast. I like playing pinball. I've heard of Scorebit, but I haven't quite jumped into that functionality yet. But who else we got? I'll start off. I'm Ron Richards. I'm the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Scorebit. and joined by my other co-founders. Jay, why don't you go next? Sure. I'm Jay Adelson. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Scorebit, and we also have Brian O'Neill here. Yeah, I'm Brian. I'm one of the co-founders. Yeah, we all met in California, and then now none of us live there anymore, so we're all over the country. Dude, no way. I'm from California too. I'm Don. I do pinball podcasts and things. So welcome, guys. Yeah. So tell me, well, first off, just so we're all on the same page, like what exactly is Scorbit? Like is this a universe that encompasses multiple platforms? Is this just for pinball? Can I put it on Donkey Kong? Like tell me as if I know nothing about it. Well, so Scorbit is a connected platform that is for pinball, but we love retro gaming, and we definitely have aspirations of expanding it beyond pinball. But right now we are focused purely on making pinball work as great as it can be. Right, Jay? Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, essentially it's a platform for both public venues like bars and operators as well as for home users. and it essentially takes what was a very solo kind of experience between the player and the machine and opens it up so that it becomes much more of a social experience and allows people to interconnect and compete and really unlock a bunch of new features that a machine sitting isolated on its own, the limitations of that have been eliminated. Yeah, and breathing new life into these old games. We work with games, solid states from the early 80s up until today. So it's nice to breathe new life into these old games. Alongside new games, yeah. I mean, that's one of the great things is that we love Certain Insider Connected, which is a great product and bringing the idea of connected pinball to the masses. and I know some other folks have been doing some stuff around connected, but our whole idea was that every pinball machine should be able to be connected. And so we set out to try to figure that out. And so pretty much everything from 1977 up until today, we're working hard. And we've got, I think, Jay, what are we up to, like 91% of every pinball machine? I mean, yes, many both ends died to get to this point, but yes. it was a labor of love that I think no one in their right mind would, would approach because it literally has taken us a decade of work and just crazy hours to make, you know, your favorite old machine all the way from, you know, 1977 work just as well as, you know, a Godzilla or a King Kong. Yeah. That is, that has been our goal a whole way and yeah we're excited we're excited about yeah like what kicked off this whole idea were you just you know a couple of guys sitting around playing pinball thinking there's got to be a better way and who else but us like what was that was going on do you guys have a tech background you know were you doing this with self-driving cars and now you transition to pinball and you pivoted we actually predate self-driving cars that's how long we've been at this. It's a little of everything, really, our story, because we are all tech people. I mean, Ron and I met when we had started an internet television network called Revision three years ago. And Ron was over there basically at the very beginning, back in 2005, 2006 and then and then brian and i met because i was ceo of dig and he was over there in our engineering group and despite the fact that we knew each other for so long i didn't know these guys were into pinball i i was pretty much brought in kicking and screaming by the two of them into the hobby did not realize what a rabbit's hole that would become yeah we kind of tricked him he was in the he was more into the arcade space and we were uh we were trying to figure out a way to get him into pinball and we brought him to california extreme and we're like check out all these pinball machines here um but it was really ron that uh pushed both of us forward with with the idea of scorebit well what i well yeah and what i love about it is that it's been a total collaborative kind of thing because you know because initially i saw don to your point I was like, there's got to be a better way to keep track of scores, right? And this is before Pindigo and before Pinball Map and before even, you know, like Pinside had a way to keep track of scores, but nobody really used it. And I was like, oh, I just want to know what my high score is. There's so many games. What is a good high score on a game, right? And I just had no, you know, and I'll give it to both Brian and Jay. They both looked at me like, yeah, but, you know, doing an app is kind of boring. and I'll give it to Jay, which was, you know, Jay was like, yeah, that's kind of boring. He's like, but wouldn't it be cool if we could figure out a way to get into the guts of a pit bull machine and extract the data and do it automatically and kind of make like, you know, kind of like an IoT device, like an Internet of Things device and upload it up to the cloud and that sort of thing. And then at the same time, Brian and I were playing in competitions and tournaments and Brian was really getting in the competitive space and Brian was bringing all these ideas about how to add competition factors to it and stuff like that. So it was really the mix of all three of us, you know, kind of collaborating, and that got us to where we are today. And what was funny is that in the early days, as we were trying to figure out how to do this, like how do you take a Meteor and extract data and upload it to a server, we talked to a lot of, like, really old, like, we found people who worked at Bally and Williams. We talked to some of the, you know, when you go to a big tournament, there's all those techs who are, like, the older guys with the big tools, and they've worked on every machine for 30 years. And we asked them, we're like, hey, is it possible to extract the data from the memory or whatever? And they looked at us and they're like, well, yeah, you could do that, but it'd be really hard. And all three of us were like, that's not a reason not to do it. That's a reason to do it. And so it became even more of a chase for us, more of a reason to try to figure that out. And that's what kind of fueled the first six years of the research and development that we did into SCORBIT. We started around 2015, and we spent about five, six years just figuring out how pinball machines work, how you get to the data, how could we translate that into modern data. And really, I'm not a tech – they say I work in tech, but I work on the more marketing and content and community side. I couldn't have done it by myself, and Jay and Brian kind of unlocked the engineering kind of thinking. And then, of course, we pulled together this ragtag all-star group of volunteers and other kind of engineers and workers and collaborators that we worked with over the years to make it all happen. But it's been a trip to just kind of answer that question, like there's got to be a better way to do this. I really think we're kind of at potentially an exciting point right now because I don't think that the reach of connected pinball and the features that can be added and player versus player connection, I don't think that's fully been even explored or vetted out yet. I mean, this may be what Xbox Live was like when it started, when we were all playing, before then, consoles at home. And I remember taking Polaroid shots of my scores in platformers just to have a record of them. And then now, of course, there's a whole revolution where now all games are digital, and everybody's streaming content connected with each other and trash-talking and stuff. Can we bring – is this like the nidus now that, oh, look, pinball's a thing. Maybe we can adapt that technology to it. And you guys have done, like, 15 years of groundwork on it already. Yes, yes, 15 long years. But the concept of the physical gaming world and, like, using it as an anchor point to create a social experience around it, this competitive socializing concept, it's really huge. At least, you know, where we are right now in Ann Arbor and all over the world, more and more people are looking for ways to kind of get off that screen, have an interactive experience in a public location, you know, whether that's a bar in our arcade or a family fun center or whatever it might be. You're talking about going out in a meet space, yeah. It's just, it's been overdue. I think a lot of folks are just looking for new ways and new mechanisms to interact in real life. And this is a great way to do it. And so I think it's a trend that probably was cooking before the pandemic. And then all the pandemic did was to kind of reinforce and push people even more. So as soon as the venue started opening again, it's not a surprise that it kind of kicked into high gear. Okay. So let's just go through some perspectives here. Like, let's start with myself. Like, I'm a homeowner of pinball machines. I do play on location. What does my interaction experience with Scorebit look like? You know, if I'm brand new, I want to get into it. I just downloaded the app. Like, what can I do with this thing? Yeah, great. Well, so immediately off the – just upon installing the app, you can use it. So we partner with the folks at Pinball Map, and so inside the app, you can use it to go find places to play pinball. Like you can open up the map and see what places are nearby you. You can – if you know you're going to travel somewhere, you can go find places to play pinball. You can see what machines are there. That's great. When you go to a place that has a location pinball, if you play a game, similar to Pindigo, you can take a picture of your score. manually type in your score and save it and keep a log of all your scores. That's kind of base. Where the kind of magic happens is that if you go to a location that has a SCORBIT machine which means that they have a SCORBITRON installed in the machine or if it a newer machine that doesn require hardware that just connected to the SCORBIT network like, for example, Pulp Fiction is going to be released very soon, and it's not going to require any hardware. It's just going to connect directly via the Internet. You won't need to take a picture. It will automatically save your score, and with that, you get a whole bunch of additional data and stuff like that that's available about your game and will keep track of every game that you play automatically. And then you get a notification when Ron beats you. Yes. Which then, you know, that could be like three days after you've already done it. He goes to the bar that you were hanging in, and you felt so superior at that moment. And then he crushes you, and you get a notification saying, well, you just beat your score. Now I've got to go back to the bar to maintain my reputation. Exactly. So now additionally, if you did go to that bar that's a scoreboard-enabled location, and just to make clear, there's not a ton of locations that are scoreboard-enabled. That's what we're working on currently. Here we are. We're talking to you right at the end of 2025. 2026 is going to be a huge year for scoreboard, a huge year for, I think, connected pinball because we're hoping that a lot of locations adopt Scorebit and you're going to see Scorebit-enabled locations pop up all across the country. And a lot of them, and that has to do with what we announced at Pinball Expo back in October, which is the fact that Scorebit-enabled locations will have the ability to launch asynchronous tournaments and competitions where players like yourself, Don, can walk into a location and drop a score and compete and win money, basically. So instead of having to go to a tournament and give up, you know, eight to 12 hours of your day and compete in a head-to-head match play or pump it up or whatever kind of style tournament it is, you can compete on your own time, on your own schedule, and potentially win a jackpot, you know, as big as it can get, depending on how many players play or how big that venue wants to put up a jackpot for. And that gets really interesting. All right. So that's. Oh, yeah, I was going to say, let's talk about that then. OK, now I'm a location owner. OK. And I've got, you know, 10 pinball machines. We do some local tournaments. It's mostly sterns, but I have a Pulp Fiction there. And let's say I'm thinking of doing a tournament. You know, Pulp Fiction sounds like everything would be hard coded already into it. And let's say I have just a stern jaws right next to it. Like, what would I have to do to incorporate Scorbit to make it a Scorbit connected location? What's involved in that? It's easy. I mean, it literally takes less than 10 minutes. it's a matter of whether or not the machine's already connected to the internet. If it is, probably it's a simple software configuration. If it is a classic machine, what you have to do is get your hands on the hardware. Now, if you're a public venue that's participating in our rollout in our program, that's at no upfront cost to you at all. So basically you take that hardware, open up your machine, stick it in there. It's a few cables. You don't have to be a pinball tech to be able to install it. Then pull out the app, which allows you to essentially connect that machine, pair that machine with the representation of that machine in ScoreBiz platform. And from that point forward, it's connected. Every score that it displays on the screen is also on the app in real time, not just after the game is completed. And so that's the first step. And then there are components to this which do better if more people are engaged with the tournament. So if you create one of these tournaments, promoting it or promoting it through Scorebit's app will draw more people into it. And that's where we have things like scorebit vision that allow people to view real time and after games are completed, the leaderboards for those games. So that's all part of the platform, and we give all these tools to the operator and the venue owner. And over time, we train them into how to make best use of those tools. Okay, I'm just thinking of nuts and bolts steps. You know, say I've got this medium sized barcade. I'm a busy owner. I've got a delivery truck in the back. I've got to interview a new waitress. And then all of a sudden the scoreboard box showed up in the mail. Like, like, what is it? Is this just like a device that I tap into the electrical system? It just kind of sits there and listens and then transmits like it's not like affecting the architecture of the machine itself. It's just kind of like an adjunct there. Not at all. Yeah, it goes into the backbox. You know, you can leverage one of the screws that keeps the little vents up in the top corner of it to keep it in place. We leverage the power of the pinball machine already, so it's very low power. As Jay mentioned, it's a couple of different connections in the backbox via USB cables. It takes maybe, as someone who is not adept at working on pinball machines, maybe, Brian, what do you think, a half an hour at most? Yeah, at most. And also, if you've installed like a topper or a color DMD, it's like just as simple as that. It's tapping into the power that's in the machine already that's used for mods like that and your pre-existing Internet, things like that. Yeah, and it connects via Wi-Fi. It connects via Wi-Fi, so you don't need to reroute your Internet or anything like that. It's meant to be as unintrusive and as simple as possible, to your point, because venue owners are busy, right? And it needs to be fairly simple to set up. Sure, yeah. Now, there is one additional piece that we announced back at Expo this year, which is we've introduced a tap pad into the product, which is basically a little device that sits under the glass at the front of the pinball machine. It's connected via USB to the Scorbitron, which sits inside the pinball machine. And it allows the user to identify themselves by just tapping their phone on the pad. it's uh it's it's animated it has leds it gives you feedback and the reason for that is so that you can actually now use scorebit to put money in the machine ah there we go yeah so it's it's a payment platform as well as it is a uh a leaderboarding system so same technology if you go to the supermarket and pay with your phone same technology tap to pay except this is tap to play as we say, and you also use that to tell the machine who you are, probably most similar to CERN scanning a QR code, but way less, you know, how you're kind of hovering the phone above that camera on a CERN machine. This is just you just hold it in front of the Scorbit logo, and your phone buzzes, and it works. So this is that near-field communication? Correct, NFC. And it's fast. The way that it's designed is so that the app is interacting with the NFC as a tag, and it basically functions so quickly that even if you're a home user, you can use that to essentially check in as the player position so you don't have to do anything additionally to make it work. Okay, now is this already programmed so that I play that one game, I walk away, like my data is already wiped from there and it's ready for the next person? I don't have to physically, as a player, know to log out. Correct. Because I know that's something that can happen with the Stern machines, especially if there's multiple credits on it and it's not set up for that. So, again, I'm just thinking of ease of use for the operator, how much troubleshooting are they going to have to do and set up on this. And if we could go back to real quick, let's say I had a Data East game, like a Tales from the Crypt. What am I actually – I don't know if there's a USB drive or port on that. No, no, no. No, no, no. So I've got a Data East Guns N' Roses in my garage right behind me, in the room behind me, and I've got Scorbit in there. The USB connector goes to our device, the Scorbitron, so you don't need to worry about that at all. And then the connection from the Scorbitron to the machine handles telling it what to do. So you're not worried about an old machine without USB. You don't need to worry about that at all. Okay. A simple way to think about it is Scorbitron is like the hub, and it's the wireless device, and it has USB ports, And one of those USB ports is for this tap pad, this NFC tap pad. Another USB port is for a CPU probe, which is something that sits between the CPU chip and the motherboard. And the last piece is for a DMD probe, which sits between the DMD cable and the DMD driver board. By taking all of this input and putting it into the hub of the Scorbitron, the Scorbitron now is able to pull any kind of data it wants from the game both passively but also write data to the game where it's required. Like, for example, changing the amount of credits in the machine or maybe it's something as simple as starting the game. Okay. But all of these components work together sort of in unison, and some games don't have dot matrix displays so that you don't need a DMD probe. There are other games like, you know, Stern Sam, where you don't need to have the CPU probe to have access to that data. So it's sort of, you know, your mileage may vary, and when you get a kit from Scorbit, you basically tell us which of these games you have, and you get all the ingredients you need to make it connected. Okay, is there like an online database of schematics on how each one will interface? Yes, it's step-by-step photo instructions showing you how to do every single step. Okay, and then do you have to personalize each one of these Scorbitrons to that game, or will it just recognize, like, does it come preloaded? It recognizes it automatically. There is some machine platform-specific hardware, namely the power adapter that takes power from the power system of the pinball machine. Like if you had a Stern, there would be a Stern connector. If you had a WPC, there would be a connector for that. And we include that because when you order the device from us, you tell us which of these things you have. All right. So say I had a Tales from the Crypt and Guns and Roses, and I sold the Tales from the Crypt, Guns and Roses come in, can I just move that same unit to the other one, given it's the same generation of game? Yes. Even if it wasn't the same generation, most likely all you'd need is a different power adapter, and then you could move it to whatever architecture you wanted to. Actually, the same Stern, the Stern power adapter that we use works in, let's see, All of the Data East, Sega, Stern, Stern Sam, Stern White Star, the same adapter works on most of those. Yeah, there aren't that many. I think all in all we have like 11 different adapters across 50 years of pinball. It's not bad. That's comprehensive. I'm just thinking from the perspective, if I had just heard about this from somebody else and I want to investigate, I don't know if you've already got this, so apologies, but do you have like a repertoire of like YouTube videos showing the ways to connect different games just so you then have a reference to go online before you reached out to contact? Yeah, absolutely. Well, you can go to support.scorbit.io, and there's a hardware installation guide that shows you every single version of this and how to go through it. Something that we learned years ago, when we first released our first version of the product back in 2020, our users basically told us that they wanted to be stepped through it using photos. So you would pull up the app, and the app would say, okay, find this. Here's where on your motherboard. Look for this connector and actually show you an animated diagram that would zoom into that connector. And that worked pretty well. I think that in this next generation of the new version of Score, but it's even easier, lighter weight devices, There's a lot more capability. The old, the old Scorbitron worked probably, you know, on most of the Williams and sort of the later stage games. The new version of the product works on far more platforms And so to make it comprehensive we put it all there on the support site And we are planning on developing video how videos and things like that We a small team so we working hard But, yeah. Yeah, but this is exciting stuff. I want to also now look at it from the perspective of a pinball manufacturer, a company. What would their experience and interaction with Scorebit be like? It sounds like that functionality comes pretty hardwired in the CGC game, or was it Roth Rills that was responsible for that, for Pulp Fiction? It was actually Play Mechanics. Play Mechanics is the designer of Pulp Fiction who worked with CGC. CGC is the manufacturer. So Play Mechanics delivered the game design and the game code and everything, and CGC is the factory that's building and shipping the games. So basically what that is is any modern pinball manufacturer, what's great is that all pinball machines now are just basically computers inside cabinets, controlling all the flippers and the pop bumpers and everything like that. And what's great is that Scorbit is basically a computer, and it's all running the same kind of code. So we've developed a software development kit that applies to, geez, Jay, how many languages do we support? I mean, basically Python, C, C++, whatever your pinball code is. Yeah, whatever your coding, Mission Pinball, we work very closely with the Mission guys. We love them, you know, the homebrew folks. We've got a bunch of homebrew folks who use Scorbit, which is awesome. But whatever software, whatever programming language you're using to make your pinball machine, you can plug in the Scorbit SDK and immediately have all the hooks into connecting your game to the Scorbit platform. And then that way, if you include that in the code, the game can ship a Scorbit right out of the box, no hardware required at all. We do support the only bit of hardware would be that NFC tap pad, which connects via USB, which most modern games now have a USB port on the computer inside the backbox, so that's easily supported. And then all you've got to do is connect the game to the Internet, log into the Scorbit platform, and then you're ready to go. So obviously looking at the landscape right now, Stern has Insider Connected installed in every one of their machines, So I don't think we'll see your tab pad make an appearance there. But have you made any inroads with other manufacturers currently about, like, shipping games and having this as a built-in feature already? I mean, yes. So, you know, we've made announcements with a few different, like, Dutch and Pedretti and, like, we talked about with Pulp Fiction. But also, just to be clear, our product works great on sterns. and we see our product in many of those modern Stern machines sitting right side by side with Stern Insider Connected. It's not an exclusive situation. And if you're an owner of a venue that has 20 machines or 50 machines, the majority of those machines still to this day are often classics. And so if you want one leaderboarding system that connects all of them together, you might have Insider Connected for your Sterns. but to have something that reaches across everything, you need to get a bit installed in those stern machines. Going back to the use case of a venue owner, I talk to a lot of arcade owners and bar owners and venue owners who, a lot of people love Stern Insider Connected. They love the leaderboards that it provides, but it's limited to 25 machines. And I talk to some folks, they're like, yeah, I have four Spike 2 machines, but I've got 10 DMDs and solid states. I want a leaderboard for all my games, and that's what Scorebit can provide. And as Jay mentioned, we run side-by-side with Stern Insider Connected. It doesn't interfere with Insider Connected. We know the folks at Stern. We love the folks at Stern. We talk to them all the time. We've got a great relationship with them. They're aware of what we're doing, and they're rooting for us too, which is awesome. So basically it's our hope to – because the way we look at it is that with the exception of Stern, Every other pinball manufacturer is working so hard to design great games and manufacture them and put them out, and nobody has really, so it seems they might be working on it, but nobody is really, in the same way that Stern has put out Insider Connected, nobody's really said we want to build our own platform, nor really should they. You know, you could take Scorbit and plug it in, and that way you can connect across all the different manufacturers, give players a single platform to keep track of all their scores, and the hard part of the work has been done, and we will gladly partner with them to help promote it and help get the word out to the venues, and it seems like a win-win for everybody. So our door is open to all manufacturers, all modern manufacturers who want to implement SCORBIT. We'd love to put it in. It's free of charge to the manufacturers. We don't charge for the SDK. It just seems we just want to basically help elevate pinball and make pinball better. Yeah, I think that functionality of being, you know, a consistent leaderboard across every machine, that's phenomenal. You know, to walk in and see, like, a full leaderboard with everything that's in there. Then you don't feel like, you know, to get on a leaderboard, you're stuck just with a stern. You can go and play the gamut of games. And the games that you play on the older systems, they mean something because they're being recorded, right? Exactly. And then it's a whole lot easier to go and tap to pay and play games than to go find cash now, find a change machine, and then what do I do with all these quarters, right? Yeah, it's a problem. And I'll be honest, you know, when I see a big crowd at a bar, I don't want to wait in line for quarters to play the game. And the change machine just seems like, I don't know why, but it's always broken. And so having a digital system is important. And I think what's probably equally important from Scorbit's perspective is sort of the alignment of the incentive. in that if Scorabit is not, our business model is not designed to make margin from charging a high percentage on transactions for putting digital money into those machines. And so we're always going to be able to provide that at essentially cost to the owners of the bars and the arcades. And so this is a way to get them digital payments without charging them a lot of money for it. And that's, I think, an important aspect. So our incentive there is to promote that, make it as cheap and easy to use as possible, and then get more people on our leaderboard. So if I'm an operator, then am I getting kind of monthly check from digital revenue from the games that store bits? Yes. And then are you collecting the payments and processing them? Yes. Okay. Good questions, good questions. Exactly. Which, by the way, is hard. That's why I was asking because that seems incredible to be able to take on all that as well. Well, so by way of, you know, context here, Ron and Brian and I, we've been doing Internet companies like this for our whole career. Right. And so what we could do was build an infrastructure that could scale for whatever it needed to both here domestically and internationally as well. I mean, since we launched our product first publicly in 2020 where you could buy the hardware, we've shipped all over the world. And the hard part for me and for us, I think, was learning how to engage that from an app and a hardware perspective. Because I had never done a connected hardware. I had been a venture capitalist investing in IoT companies. I knew that hardware is insanely difficult to do. So probably if I had thought too far ahead, I might have stopped because it was so hard to do. Let's go back to those pinball repair guys who are like, yeah, that's really hard. We should have listened to them. Yeah, it's really hard. But that being said, you know, that part of our background around the infrastructure, that one was we checked that box already. And now that we spent all this time on the hardware all these years, now that part is much, much more streamlined than it used to be. So it is difficult, but that's kind of what makes it fun. Oh, yeah. I'm trying to see, you know, the future of where this whole process is going because it does encompass so many different things between the hardware and the social part and, like, payment processing. Like, are you looking at becoming like a monetized social platform then? Or are you looking at being a hardware company? Or are you looking at being a digital payment currency company? I think it's probably – I mean, it's tough. We're looking at being a social competitive gaming company, if that's the way. We don't want to be a payments company. We don't want to be like those yellow boxes on vending machines. Like, that's not interesting to us, right? Like we don't want to – we're doing payments as a means to an end because it allows us to do things like the tournaments and things like that. We don't want to be a hardware company even though we've designed hardware and we've built hardware. That's a means to the end to allow us to build this platform. What really gets us interested is like connecting these machines and then what can you do with it? Giving a bar that's got three pinball machines in the corner a new way to drive more revenue with those machines, that's really interesting. Giving an operator who's got a route with eight locations with two machines each a way to make a tournament that requires players to go play a game on four of his machines at eight different locations, that's really interesting. Working with our friend Andreas at Matchplay and building integrations to make tournament software that much faster to record scores at tournaments using Scorebit's technology, that's more interesting. Like doing all those things to help make pinball better, that's more interesting to us, right? And then like we talked about at the top of the show, taking what we learned from pinball and then turning the eye of Sauron to the left and looking at Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man and going, oh, what can we do there? Or looking at skee-ball, what can we do there? The idea of like – I'm a Gen X kid, so growing up in the arcade and the mall was like nirvana to me, right? And looking at the – now I've got kids and my son begs me to take him to the arcade and thinking about what his arcade experience is going to be growing up and how it can be more than just wasting money on claw machines, doing something that's a little more social, a little more community-based from everything that we've learned. I mean, Brian, how many hours and days and months have we spent at tournaments and making friends around the country, right? Like that's the best part of what we've done in pinball and just trying to give back a little. Right, Brian? Yeah, there's so many people that I met through pinball, through competitions and leagues and tournaments and things like that. So I'm super excited. There's this one video that Jay did where he had the app press the start button for him automatically, and the game lit up behind him. And that just made me really excited about all the things we could do with this hardware and what we can do in the future. And we don't have all the answers either. They're like we can have like the homebrew community. They think of new features all the time and different ways we can do things like achievements and get people more interested in their games. Yeah. I mean that's a whole other thing. The idea of like if I have an Addams Family, no one's making achievements or badges for Addams Family. We can. Yeah. Yeah. So so if you have an Addams Family in your home collection, Don, you could buy a Scorbatron and you can connect it at home and and have a whole new reason to play Addams Family to get all that to unlock all those achievements. You can have all of your pinball machines in your home basement be on your own leaderboard. So when people come over, they can try to get their initials up on your leaderboard. You can create your own arcade in your own basement as a home user. So it doesn't just necessarily need to be a venue, you know, kind of a public venue experience also. So that's why – so scoreboard works on both those levels. Yeah, I think that comes back to that's my specific condition right now too is I've got a half a dozen or so games downstairs in my basement. I'd love to be able to connect them all. And when I would get, let's – you know, achievements in Adam's Family or something, are those coming up as notifications on my phone? Do they pop up on the DMD? Because that would be incredible. Oh, yeah. We can do that. Yes. Yes. That's exciting. That's exciting. In fact, our old product that we launched back in 2020, one of the things that we were having so much fun with was when you would tap in to the app, it would say your name on the DMD. And then we added the ability to send a message to the DMD. So for pinball streamers they were connecting it to their Twitch accounts If you type something in it would come across the DMD And now with our new dmd probe it even more powerful because um it does a lot of the decoding on board it uh it more flexible in terms of the number of different types of dmds it basically supports all of them so now the ability for us to do that not just actually on a dmd but also on an alphanumeric display is really really fun and we're just we're recooling it to make it more tightly integrated with the game. Can you imagine streaming a game online and your comments are popping up on the DMD or the boosted comments that people pay a dollar or two for, those are the ones that show up on there? I think that you did that Brian, or was it it was, I'm trying to remember We did that, yeah. I was streaming Attack from Mars and you could either write a message on the screen or you could blank it out and right when I started the video mode someone paid to blank out the screen so I couldn't see where I was firing the... That's awesome. Also, one of my favorite things that we could do is the reverse of that, which is because we are capturing all the data of what's going on in the game, we know what's happening and what mode you're in and when you get a jackpot. So we're developing a live scoreboard that can be displayed on a TV screen. So when you are watching someone play, instead of having to look over their shoulder to see what's going on, you can see what their score is, what's happening in real time, and then also what mode they're in, what jackpot they just got, they got an extra ball. And it's great for a public venue when people are watching, when you're watching in a tournament to see what's happening, but also at home to see what's happening, to explain to somebody who might be seeing what's going on, but to have that live kind of experience, again, without having to encroach on their personal space by looking over that tiny DMD to see what's happening. And what I even also like is that we're developing the way to see where you are in real time on the leaderboard. So as you're playing, if you know, oh, you know, and actually Jersey Jack does this on their games, which I think is a great feature, and we're going to bring it over in a scoreboard, which is the idea where like, oh, wow, this score is currently like 10th on the leaderboard, but I'm only like 2 million away from moving up to 5th. And that's going to motivate me to keep playing, to keep my ball alive, right? And so like bubbling up those data points during the game makes it that much more exciting. Yeah, totally. I was going to mention that during competitions and stuff, when you're looking over someone's shoulder, nothing's worse than when the DMD or the LCD screen doesn't show what your actual score is. And it just keeps going through this animation and this animation and Super Jackpot and all this stuff. And I'm like, I wonder if they passed my score or not. And you can look at it right in the app or on the TV and see if they passed you even before they know it. And we've had, I think it was in Denver, the World Championships where the Nationals, the broadcast booth knew that they passed it before even the player did. I think it was Escher who was playing Star Wars. It was about to win the championship, and he's playing, and it's during the Star Wars part with the TIE fighters, so he doesn't see the score. but all of the audience who was there at the time is watching the score in real time and all cheer because he's just won the whole championship and he's like why did why is everybody else cheering right now because he can't see it and it's that is an interesting thing that's happened at indus quite a lot where you know at the world championship where for some reason we have the score and the player doesn't. And it's always fun to put that up on like the lower third on the Magic Castle, right? Yeah. Mystery Castle. Mystery Castle, that's what it is, yeah. The Dancing Skeletons. Yeah, we've had occasions in this where the game has malfunctioned or like a fuse blew and the DMD went out, but we still had the scores because it goes through the Scorbatron before it goes out to the DMD. and it helped save, I think it was Zach McCarthy, one of his top scores. Yep. I think it was high stakes too, so there was money at stake. Of the tournament. Yeah. Yeah, it was the high stakes, yeah. I did see that when I pulled up the app this morning, that you can win money through tournaments utilizing this. So how do I get paid? How does that work for me as just a player? So, yeah, so it's all done basically in the app. So we're currently right now, at this moment in time, we are in beta testing of the tournament's feature. It's going to be rolling out in early 2026 at Scorbit-enabled locations. And the way it just basically works is that, you know, you pay to play the game with the Scorbit app, and then you also pay to enter the tournament the same way you would at a public tournament, and then other people play the tournament. The jackpot, if you're in a state where it's legally okay to have a rising jackpot, like, you know, the jackpot gets bigger the more people play. And let's say, Don, because you're such a great pinball player, You're going to come in first, and now you've won $200. You receive a notification in the app saying, hey, the tournament just ended. You won $200. And we'll say, here's your money. What do you want to do with it? And at that point, you can decide to either transfer it to your bank account or keep it in the Scorbit app to go play more pinball. And then you just move on from there. And we handle all the money, transferring the money. Basically, it's like, you know, it's probably most similar to like a Venmo experience where you have a balance in your app, and then you can either pull it into your bank account or put more money back into the app. Or order some sweet Scorbit merch. Yes, exactly. Exactly. We've got a wonderful line of clothing and accessories. Yeah, I know. A lot of what we expect to have happen with the tournaments is the competitions. Over time, there will be different formats. You've probably heard of Tops-type competitions before. High-score tournaments. High-score tournaments. High-score tournaments. And there will be goal-based tournaments. There will be invitationals where users can essentially invite a closed group of people to compete with a different stake. But the main thing here is just to enable that asynchronous behavior. And then when the term has ended for whatever that contest is, the payment is automated. So it just goes into your bank account, which in my opinion is one of my favorite features of some of these global leaderboarding games where if you're playing really well and then a week later you find out that you've won and suddenly you're just a little bit richer than you were before. I organize many tournaments where dealing with all the cash people entering it and just getting envelopes and making sure everything's correct and just like it just takes so much time and this will be a lot easier I do like the fact that maybe Tuesday night doesn't work out for somebody because of work or something so they're always missing tournaments but if it's like there's seven days here's the games that are in it, here's the locations to go play here's the entrance fee, go nuts And it can be state to state, too. It's not just your region. So you can compete kind of coast to coast. Exactly. Or global. Yeah, the plan for us is to roll out to a lot of locations here in the United States over the course of next year. But we are already an international business. We have Scorbitrons and Scorbit rolling all over the world right now. And so our plan is to roll these new features out internationally as well. So just get more people playing pinball. That's the goal here. I mean, when it comes down to it, I'm a simple man, and I want to have the best game room in my neighborhood. I want it better than all my friends, so they're all super jealous of me. And so if I could have, like, that big screen display downstairs where everything is connected, that would be super fun. If I could be sitting at home and get an alert on my phone that Sterling has beaten two Demogorgons in ball one in less than 10 minutes, and I can go down and try to beat that, that's going to get me up back into my game room to go and do that. I hope that's the functionality we're talking about. That is what we're talking about. That's exactly the plan. It's a way to maximize your pinball fun at home and then also get you off your butt and get out to go play with people out on location. That's what Scorbit's – my hope, our hope is that Scorbit becomes kind of the pinball companion, the digital pinball companion on your phone that helps you keep track of your scores, see what your friends are doing, win you some money, go find new places to play, and just basically becomes kind of a go-to app for all your pinball needs. All right. Well, tell me how to get active into this. I know for myself I was able to download the app, but how do I order equipment to supplement my games and get them going? It's all at the Scorbit website, which is at scorbit.io. If you go there on a web browser, if you hit shop, You can get into our store, and that's where we sell our hardware. If a venue owner or operator is listening to this podcast and is curious about it and wants to find out about the program to connect their machines to Scorbit, there's a page on our website all about operators, and there's a form there they can fill out to get in touch, and we'll reach out to you and start the process of talking about that. But it's all on the website. And, yeah, our contact information is on the website. If you have any questions, you can email us at info at scorebit.io. We're happy to answer any questions anybody has. We are as open of the book as possible because we know what we're doing is pretty out there in terms of the technology side of it. People have lots of questions, and we love answering those questions. And usually people are like, well, what – people always try to stump us. Like, well, what about this? And then we answer, and they're like, oh, that's pretty cool, and then we move on. There's also a Scorbit Discord where a lot of the Scorbit both developers from manufacturers are hanging out. Also, the VPN community, which we love, which also can connect to Scorbit and all of the players and users and home users all on the Discord server who could also answer questions for you as well. But we lurk in there as well and can answer your questions. and I would say for anyone who is interested in this stuff, just remember that if you just go to the website, scorebit.io, it's all there, and we'll point you to the right place. Do you have a link to the Discord on the website? I believe we do, right? Yep, and you go to the little social media links, it's at the Discord logos down there. I do love Discord, yeah, especially for tech kind of stuff. It's super fun. Can you give me a ballpark cost to buy in if I just want to get this on one of my games at home? Oh, yeah, it's not even a ballpark, I can tell you. So depending on the machine, a Scorpion costs between $359 and $399, and that price varies based on the different components. So obviously a solid state is different than a 90s DMD, that sort of thing. So somewhere between $359 and $399, and less money than a color DMD, right? That's how you kind of think about it. This is a mod or an add-on that you bring onto your machine. and like we mentioned for venue owners and operators who are out in the field who want to participate in our digital payments and competitions products, we offer the hardware at no extra cost. They just need to get in touch with us and we can work out the terms with them. All right, perfect. What else do you guys want to get out there? Just thanks for the time. We really appreciate you being curious about it and we're really excited about what we're doing and hopefully we'd love to hear about your experience and keep us posted about it. And as we launch the tournament's product and go in more locations, we'll keep you posted. And if we open a location nearby you, we'd love for you to check it out, and hopefully you win some money. Yeah, and tell your local bar and your local arcade owners about Scorebit so that they can also join the fun. Yeah, well, I just signed into the app, and this place called Somewhere Else, it's a bar about five miles from me, has a South Park, and the leaderboard is empty, so I'm going to go there and jump on it and try it out. Nice. Outstanding. Good luck. I'll report back. Brian O'Neill, Jay Ellison, and Ron Richards, thanks for joining, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Don. All right. Take care. Oh, man, what a fantastic conversation. I am hyped, and I'm excited for some score, but I've got the app downloaded. I'm about to go hit it up and record some scores. If you want to get in on some games, email madpinball at info at madpinball.com. Tell them Don sent you. Everybody else, go download some Scorebit. Let's trial this out. Email me back at donspinballpodcast at gmail.com. And let me know about what your experience with the Scorebit app is, man. Let's blow this thing up. Talk to you later.