. All those guys work for me. Hello everybody. Welcome. I want to start out by saying thank you to everybody. I know that this will end up on the web and I know that a lot of people beyond the people in this room are going to see this presentation. So I'm going to talk as if I'm talking to everyone, not just you guys. So the very first thing I want to do is I want to say thank you because the response to Deadpool has been really overwhelming. And I just, I guess it's been a little while since I personally had a hit game, and so it feels really good. So thank you. Thank you. I was having lunch down the street today and I went to pay for my lunch. I had a cheeseburger and a beer and the girl behind the counter said, that guy bought you a beer. And I said, what guy? And he said, well, he's not there anymore, but he bought you a beer. So whoever you are that bought me the beer, thank you. You're welcome. All right, so I'm going to take you through a lot of the Deadpool stuff, and I'm going to show you some behind-the-scenes inside-the-studio shots, and I'm going to introduce you to a lot of the guys that worked on the game who are in the room, actually. and I've been really blessed with the crew that helped me make Deadpool. The very first thing that we're going to do is we're going to watch the official, this is the official debut premiere, never before seen, of the company's making of video. So everybody else will see this soon enough, but you guys can see it first. Three, two, one, boom. Everything that's Deadpool is in this game. Weapons and katanas. Dinosaurs. Little Deadpool. Megalodon. Chimichanga truck. You go to the disco. He travels back in time. Mutants. Sabretooth. Mystique. It's crazy with ninjas. And you've got Deadpool narrating it all. Oh, hello. Welcome to my game. I am Deadpool. It's based on the character Deadpool from the comic book. The popularity of the character got so great in the world that he's ready for his own pinball machine. Deadpool is the kind of character that the irreverence of the character lends itself to having some fun. That's what I'm talking about! I love Deadpool, and historically, he's done everything. And so there's his life, his loves, his foes, the insanity inside his head. You know, that all gave us freedom to create this big mix of stuff. You know, music, visuals, the pixel art, the 80s sounds. Every game designer you talk to, I think, will tell you that, you know, it's all about easy to learn, hard to master. I wanted simple toys, simple ball interactive stuff. And I hadn't really done a game where I was very focused on the flow of the play field or the shots for a while. And so in Deadpool, I did that. Deadpool's got a lot of interesting ideas put into it. You've got different shots you've never seen. You've got a really interactive toy right in the middle. And you've got this shot on the left flipper shoots the right side of the play field to feed a side ramp. The ball gets whipped around this wire form up this side ramp and it actually crosses through the play field unguided by anything into the ninja lock. It's a very satisfying shot. It's not easy, but when you make it, it's like, oh man, that's awesome. It's Little Deadpool time. The Little Deadpool bash toy is a lot of fun. just to interact with him by hitting him, and he's like, hey, cut it out. Woo! You can knock the targets down and hit a little deadpool, and then it'll lock the ball for you behind the three bank, and you have a hurry up timer where you finally release it again, and then it starts a multiball for you. The very first time I had springs on the katana, a bunch of guys walked in and there was no voice, there was nothing, I just shot it and he wiggled, and all these guys cracked up, and I was like, okay, I'm going somewhere here. Part of the feature of the Alien Premium is a lift ramp that allows you to divert the ball back to the right flipper to continue shooting these disco loops. Then you've activated this mode where Dazer is fighting vampires and it activates the mirror ball. There's like all kinds of flow all over the place. You can keep the ball going as long as you make the shot. It's very energetic and intense. When we sit down to make these things, now that we've got the LCD display, we have to decide, you know, what are we doing and what fits. We decided to come up with, you know, 1990 trapped in a video game temple. Basically, they created a video game in addition to the pinball machine that we're making because, you know, we had to have stuff that, by design, is supposed to look like 90s pixel art from the fighting games of the time. Funny thing is limitations are what drove the look of those games. Limited color palettes, smoothing out shapes and things like that. And now we have 3D characters and then we shoot them through a pixel pipeline. And we'll have 30 frame punches and we actually had to throw away all of it to get it down to the purest essence of what a punch is, a 3D frame thing. You know, eliminated three out of four frames of animation, and now you nailed it. Anytime you go into a battle or a quest in the game, you're actually going to see a video game being played that reacts completely to the way you play the game. Battle is lit at the scoop. You choose who you're going to fight against, and then they start fighting. Battle. When you make shots, Deadpool is hitting Sabretooth, and he's taking his health down. And then you have this opportunity to make a final shot that's going to cash out a bunch of points. and you make that shot and it's a big knockout deadpool wins the fun part to me is looking at these things and thinking what should they sound like every switch and every button on the play field has to have a sound so there are over 70 pieces of music in the game and then over 300 sound effects and over 3 000 speech calls it's not that big of a deal there's some funny sounds on Deadpool. And there's some classic pinball sounds in there too. Very chunky, low bit kind of stuff. And it's mixed in also with music. There are four original songs that have vocals that were written specifically for the game. There's a rap song, a country song, a metal song, and an R&B song. This is, I'm Deadpool, I'm a cool guy, I'm going to make this mixtape for myself. And it's all music about me. So it's a really interesting mix of stuff, but it all works really well. It's actually one big piece of art. Let me put it this way, I think it's been a work of art for each one of us in each of our respective mediums. Deadpool, it's zany, it's crazy, and the ball's wild. I think it's got punch. It's loudmouthed in your face. You'll really enjoy it. I think it's going to be a classic, and nobody else will ever attempt to do this because it'd be crazy. That's Deadpool Pinball. That was awesome! So, yeah, the thing that really gave us the freedom to put this zany amount of stuff together is the fact that we chose to go down the path of the comic book. and the freedom that that gave us was that we sat in a room and we said, you know what, I think, wouldn't it be cool if it had 80s pinball sound and wouldn't it be cool if I want all these different pieces of music and, you know, I'm talking to Jerry Thompson and Tanya and we're talking about this and I'm saying, you know what, let's do, like, remember that the old shaft tune? I'm just talking about shaft. Let's do all that stuff. And we need a rap tune. We need a country music tune. We need all this stuff. And the same thing with the computer graphics guys, the motion graphics guys. When we sat with them, the notion that we had nothing to work with. Marvel said, yeah, here's Deadpool. you know, but there's no video, there's no anything, because we didn't license the film. So we had to create 100% of the content from scratch. And the fact that there was nothing is the fact, is what allowed us to create this. The Deadpool franchise, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the Deadpool franchise, every artist, and I say artist in the broadest sense, meaning everyone that touches Deadpool is given a tremendous amount of freedom to sort of make Deadpool their own. And so that's why Deadpool has been in all those different, you know, if you pick up a Deadpool comic book from today, it's way different than it was even five years ago, meaning that every artist, every combination of writer, everyone has gotten some freedom to do what they do. And that's what we got. We got this freedom. So the group of guys that put this together really sort of, you know, hey, let's just do what we want to do with it. And that's what we did. And so I think that is the essence of the success that we had. I think that's the, that ability, that freedom also energized us. You know, it energized us to create more stuff and invent more stuff and try more wacky stuff. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to jump around here a little bit. I'm going to show you, this is the MasterCAD model for Deadpool. This is what myself and the mechanical engineer work in all the time, and we're constantly going back and forth. I, most of my teams, some more than others, but most of my design teams work in multiple mediums. What multiple mediums, I don't, if you were here earlier and you watched Keith Elwin's presentation about how he got into pinball and how he designed Iron Maiden, what you can take away from that is that, you know, you're, yeah, you're in this like really expensive CAD package designing this stuff, but you know what, it's all virtual until you go in the shop and make a ramp with your hands and put it someplace and shoot a ball at it and then that confirms that the thing that you did beautifully in CAD really will work. Now the CAD is really important because manufacturing, what a lot of people in our business don't don't yet understand is that manufacturing is about repeatability. It's about making, you know, Deadpool number five work as well as Deadpool number 5,000. So, and the CAD gives us the ability to control that and make things reproducible. I'm going to jump out here for, well, I'm going to jump over here. This is something else. This is, so this is that same CAD model that you saw. At some point in time, what I do is I take Jeremy's art, I take the artist's art and I map it to my play field. And then I make him and I stand around it together and it allows us to figure out what you're really going to see, what you're not going to see, what we could improve, what we could move because He can't be working in a vacuum removed from where I am because the two things have to come together. So it's about that attention to detail. It's about, you know, a ramp flap, not stepping on an insert or a piece of art or a word or, you know, where does the text go over an insert? And so I do this right away and I look at it in 3D and I spin it around and I go underneath ramps and I look everywhere like all zoomed in and then I give it, then I call him in and I've already circled all the things that are not right and then he goes back and makes changes and we do this iteration back and forth a bunch of times till we get it right and we're happy with it and then we let it go. So I'm going to jump out here for a second so that you can see the real tool in action. So this is the real tool. This is the real model. Oh, you're not seeing this. Why are you not seeing this? Do I have to close my PowerPoint maybe? OK, there you go. All right, so this is that same MasterCAD model that you saw. I've removed the art just to make it a little bit more legible at this scale. And you can see the little spotlights behind Dazzler that everybody's talking about. Everyone on the Internet is trying to figure out how to do that to their pro. Maybe we should sell an accessory. And, you know, there's all this stuff, right? and every nut, bolt, and screw, every print circuit board, you know, they're all in here so that we can see how everything fits and how everything works and we can make changes, et cetera. I'm going to turn off a couple of the really intense models to make this a little bit better to play with. Like this guy, he's kind of tough. Let's see if I can find him. I had the most frustrating experience with this CAD program this morning. I went to the studio this morning to get this presentation ready. And my machine said that my authorization to use the program wasn't valid. And I spent three hours on the phone with SolidWorks tech support. And the license that's running this is a special license that they had to give me because they couldn't figure it out in the time that I had. And I said, dude, I have a presentation in a couple of hours, and you can't do this to me. So, I'm going to answer one question, a question that I've seen on the Internet a lot, and this will allow me to, I'm going to turn off the Katana. Oops, I didn't want to do that. So everybody's, everybody's talking about these little blue rubbers that I use, right? I invented these little blue rubbers in Johnny Mnemonic. You guys ever play that game? OK, so the reason I invented these little blue rubbers, and I've used them ever since, since I'm not a huge fan of them, to tell you the truth. But they do a thing that I'm going to show you in a second that nobody realizes. And I know that nobody realizes, because I see the questions on the internet all the time. So I'm going to answer them tonight. Hopefully all you guys on Pinside that have created a 300 post long thread on these blue rubbers will understand. So the single biggest thing that these blue rubbers do is that if this was a post instead of a blue rubber, you can see how much it closes the shot down. Right? So there's a ball going into the ball guide, right? And what should I do with this rubber? because if I put it, if I bias this side of the guide, I make this inside shot close, and if I go to this side, I make the orbit shot impossible. Okay? So the Colossus shot, which was a shot that, you know, it's sort of a bonus, really, because by all rights, This shot shouldn't even exist. You come off this flipper, you want to be just to the right of this ramp wall, but you have to be to the left of the scoop And if you not you going in the scoop and if you wide you going into the edge of the ramp right So that shot is really tight to come in here and come around to hit this target And if you've made the shot, you know what I'm talking about, right? You have to be exactly where you need to be. And it would be impossible if I took a post and I put the post right there. You kiss the shot goodbye, it's not going to be there, right? So, I mean, these are, we've just talked about like, you know, a couple hours in my day of designing Deadpool, okay? The amount of detail that goes into these things, hopefully when we're done here, you'll get a little taste of it. But it's a lot of stuff like that, guys. It's not, you know, it's like there's a compromise. If you really want me to get rid of the blue rubber, we're going to get rid of a shot. A standard two-flipper Italian bottom game, the Italian bottom, that's what I use, that's what Steve Ritchie uses. That standard thing, the average game has essentially a seven-shot array. You've got 20 and a quarter wide on the play field. you're just not going to get that many more shots up here. You can play the game of staggering stuff up and staggering stuff down. Seven-shot array, fellas. That's the deal. So when you start trying to get an eighth shot, you're going to use the blue rubber. That's the deal. Okay, enough of this. Let's go on to some more fun stuff. I hope that gives you a little bit of vision into a little piece of my world. Okay, so we're back to this. Let's get past that. Let's get past that and past that. Okay, so the pixel art, you know, we had a lot of fun with this too, right? This is supposed to be the hell house. This is where Deadpool goes to get his missions, et cetera. And you notice the old Stern video games in the background. And, of course, you see the old Stern pinball. And also, of course, Deadpool's playing his own game because that's what he would do. And so, you know, it's all this kind of stuff that started falling out on the table when we started talking about making the game, which makes it a lot of fun. I'm just going to flash through a bunch of these screens. I hope you see some of the stuff in the game. That's really where you should be seeing them, not in my PowerPoint. But you've seen some of this stuff. We just made things up. You know, Wolverine eating turkey in the Hell House with his claws. We're going to show you a whole mode that we built around that. And then at some point, we decided that whenever Deadpool broke the fourth wall, which is a thing that Deadpool does in all the Deadpool fiction, that he was going to be super high res. He wasn't going to be 90s pixel art. So we made that distinction. When he breaks the fourth wall, he's super high res. When he's inside the 90s video game, he's pixelated by design. line. We could have made the whole game high res, we could have made the whole game low res, we just thought it was another fun, cool thing to do, right? So this is the 3D CAD model of Deadpool that was used in a variety of different places and animations throughout the game. The motion graphics guys which you're going to meet in my presentation a little bit later, are a super talented crew and we can pretty much make anything we want. So I'm just going to play this. This is a bunch of little character animations. This is what we sent Marvel for approval, high-level approval. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. So, this was a very, you know, at some point in time, you know, we, Marvel, like all licensors, has 100% right of approval on every nut, bolt, screw, piece of art in a licensed product. and Deadpool is no exception. By the way, they love us. They basically said we really, like, they had no idea that this was going to land as the thing they licensed. And they were super impressed to the point where, I mean, like, Rob Liefeld, the guy that invented Deadpool, reached out to Jeremy to congratulate him on his art. And that's praise of the highest nature. So I know you guys all think, a lot of people think we wing it. We don't wing it. We don't wing anything. Every one of those animations, every scene in the game, everything we do is storyboard and thought through. The reason we do this is because that is how you do this in a professional way, within a budget, within a time frame. So this gentleman is part of the Kizavat Brothers. The Kizavat Brothers, you know, it sounds like train robbers, doesn't it? Those dastardly Kizavat boys. They're sitting right over there. And they're very talented. One of the Kizavet brothers, Michael, is a programmer, and the other Kizavet brother, this gentleman right here, is Tom Kizavet, and he does a lot of our storyboarding. So you're going to see a bunch of storyboards. This is all stuff that was made to essentially visualize what we were going to do before we did it. This This is the way that, you know, this is the way the movie guys do it. It's the way the video game guys do it. It's the way we do it. It's the way we have to do it because that's how you do this effectively. Right? There's some of the ‑‑ so nobody sits down to make anything unless we've talked about it, thought it through. And everybody, what the storyboards do is they get everybody on the same page, even the sound guy. The sound guy knows that he's got a series of sound effects related to ghosting ninjas. You know, what does it sound like when you ghost a ninja? Well, you know, he wouldn't have known that you were going to ghost ninjas until he saw this. Okay, so lots of storyboards. I'm just showing you like a tiny little like fraction of the portfolio that Tom had to generate. great. These are the models that you've seen in the game. The chimichanga truck I personally modeled in my CAD system. I always wanted to design a hot rod chimichanga truck. So if you look closely, you can't tell in that image, but if you look closely at the ones in the game, it's got, you know, it's got, let's see if I can go in here. Let me see if I can get it up for you. I can bring this out. It's also got a time travel trail. This was a big, you know, this was a big discussion between Jeremy and I, what this should be, you know, this trail of stuff coming up. Because, you know, this is a time travel truck. So you can see that I designed this chimichanga truck. And the way you can tell is it's got side pipes and it's got an air dam right down here and it's got a hood scoop and it's got a wing. So that is a hot rod chimichanga truck because in my head... Oh, damn, okay. All right, here we go. All right, sorry. We have to do this again. Now can you see... No? Okay. Did I have to close? I guess I did. Okay. All right, here we go. So here's the Chimichanga truck. It's got side pipes. You know, it's got an air dam and a hood scoop and a wing because that, I mean, I can't imagine Deadpool driving anything else. So that was kind of fun. I got an opportunity to make a chimichanga truck. So Little Deadpool is a character that shows up in the Deadpool fiction. And Deadpool is not the sanest person in the world. So this is one of the constructs in his head. And he shows up at the beginning of the stories and we decided that we had to do something with him. We weren't exactly quite sure what. So this was, you know, these are images from Marvel, you know, from Little Deadpool. I asked Jeremy to create our own version. One One of the interesting things about Marvel is when you're working on their properties, they want you to be true to the character and the medium and the fiction, but you have some amount of freedom that's almost encouraged for you to make it your own. So they didn't want my little Deadpool to be like anybody else's little Deadpool. That means that our little Deadpool had to be an original little Deadpool. So he still had to be a little Deadpool, but he had an original. So Jeremy sketched this guy up and I didn't like him. I didn't like the body type, I didn't like the head, et cetera. So this is the one, this is actually a 3D printed model that we decorated and put the springs on. You'll notice also that he has a spring at his waist, which the production ones don't. The reason the production ones don't have the spring at their waist is because when we built it like this and tried it, it was a motion that was almost imperceptible. It didn't add that much more to the character, so I thought that's just a level of complexity, I don't think we really need it, so I took it out. This is the sketch that I originally made and then one day I was in Tanya's office and Tanya has a collection of Funko Pops, I guess, what are these things called? Is that what they're called? Funko Pops? Right. And you've seen them, they're kind of, they're sort of a bobble head. And I saw that thing and I was like, you know what, I wonder if I can't use that to mock this up. And so we put that on the game, that's what you're seeing there. And you'll see that I cut it up and I added the springs. This one still has the waste spring. And then the gentleman you see in the picture is Robert Blakeman. He's my mechanical engineer. So every design team has a, we call him a project engineer. Project engineer is a mechanical engineer by trade at BSME. And he's a guy that interfaces with a lot of the procurement and manufacturing functions. So he's outward facing to procurement and manufacturing. Works very closely with the game designer to help the game designer realize the vision of the game. So Rob and I work very, very closely on how all of these mechanisms in the game work. So I usually do a first pass. I have pretty high mechanical aptitude, so I do a lot of – I don't like to throw stuff over the fence to my engineers. So I go a long way and then I give it to Rob and Rob is great at refining it and making it manufacturable and cost effective. And he will calculate things that I have no facility to calculate. Like he'll calculate how long is something going to last before it wears out. and he'll do whatever it is that he needs to do to make my stuff last a long time and be easily to assemble. We go back and forth a lot. So it's been a great relationship. He was my engineer on Batman, and him and I conceived that turntable. And if you've ever raised the playfield on a Batman, You see the level of complexity in that big Geneva mechanism that's in Batman. And I have to tell you that, and I'm not bragging, but that mechanism has been remarkably reliable considering how complex it is, because it's a very complex thing. The mini play field on Batman locks three balls and it has three positions that face the player. and it has a television screen with a real TV in it and it has lights and it's got switches and targets. It's got all this stuff and Rob and I sweated that thing. We talk about the layout on Deadpool. One of the reasons that I went in the direction of let's keep it really simple is because I had just spent some large portion of my life wrestling with the complexity of Batman. And I said, you know what, I need to go in another direction. I need really simple devices. I'm going to worry about the shots. Because Batman was tough. It sucked the life out of me to get that thing working. And so, and it also, you know, the mini play field takes up so much real estate in Batman that there's not, I didn't have a lot of leeway in terms of what I could do with the shots, right? And it's my doing. I mean, it's like, you know, it's, you know, there's no one to blame but me. But anyway, so there's some insight in there. And then there's this guy, right? I mean, Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), Zombie Yeti, right? What a talent, you know? I mean, look at this art. Look at those colors. Look at just the contrast. Look at the ink lines. I mean, the guy is just a master. You know, this is, by the way, these, so these, I think you've seen these in Stern presentations before. This is not only developed for the, to get all the internal sales and marketing people on board about what we're doing, but they're also developed to send to Marvel or whoever the licensor is about the different art packages for each of the different price points. By the way, this is, I mean, I'm really, I'm going to own one of these, and I am very torn whether it needs to be the ocean blue, you know, or this guy, right? It's really a tough call. It's really a tough call. I mean, look at this is the back glass that went on the premiums, and then a mirrored glass version went on the LEs. But, I mean, the guy is just amazing. And then there's these two guys right here. What a pair. The gentleman in the tan, stern shirt is Tanyo Kleiss, my partner in crime in this. He is the lead software developer on this game. And it's his first time in that seat, by the way. He's a guy with a very deep history in video games as a programmer. He came to us from Valve, the video game company, and has a really broad range of experience and an English degree of all things. So, but he, him and I meshed pretty well. He's a really easy guy to work with. I came away from the game thinking, God, I got to make another game with this guy because it's really, it was very simple to work with him. He brought a lot to this and not only a lot of the creative and he laid out all of the progression through the game He laid out the initial development of the rule set and wrote all the code But the great thing one of the other things that he brings to the party is that he a very good leader He's a good manager. So he knew how to manage the elements of the team that he worked with, such as the other programmers and the computer graphics guys and Jerry Thompson, the sound designer, in such a way that everybody was kind of moving in the right direction. And the beauty of that is that it offloads some of that responsibility from me. And trust me, I had like plenty to do. So it was kind of good. Like I always felt that he's got this under control. The other guy is Tim Sexton, who's been with us a short period of time, who's an avid pinball player, a great pinball player, by the way. And he has been, I mean, he just jumped in with both feet into the company. He's making an impact. Because he's a very high-level player, I've, in the product development group, I've been hiring a lot of guys with a lot of tournament-grade pinball experience because they bring an insight into the rules and the evolution of the rules through a game that is unique to them, and only they can have them because they have that ability to play at that level and ability to imagine how the game evolves and what if the game doesn't evolve the way the designer designed it. And so the idea is that these things have to be fun, but they have to be fun in spite of all of the things that may happen. And so Tim's made a great impact. These guys were staring at some problem, And then I think they decided that it was more fun to play Vectrex tank game, because that's what they're doing. So everybody wants to see the studio. So this is a snapshot in the studio, and this is like in the thick of battle. This is the computer graphics team and the software team. the two key guys in that photo that run those teams Chuck Ernst on the right side of the screen in the black shirt and then of course Tanya in the tan shirt putting something on the board every task in the game is a card and they don't come off the wall until the tasks are done so again to speak about how we don't shoot from the hip we think into the game we tear it apart into bits and pieces the bits and pieces go into this matter of organization just like the storyboards so the storyboards may have yielded a bunch of these cards somebody has to do this somebody's got to hook up Colossus and Colossus is going to do this and he needs these effects and all this kind of stuff so that's the team these meetings accelerate When a game is a couple of months out before shipping, we start doing what we call dailies. And dailies, in dailies, the entire development team stands around a functioning game, usually a white wood, and we all play the game together, and everyone talks about all the issues and all the problems, and everyone makes notes about what's up in their particular discipline. discipline. And that's how we drive games to the end. And every game does it, every game team. There's a game team right now that's in that process. Deadpool's passed it. Deadpool's done with that. We're not doing dailies anymore. We just have to close out. You know, we got to get to 1.0. Batman's not in this process. Batman's on its way to 1.0. But there is a game team right now that's doing dailies. Every day, 10 o'clock, they play the game together, they make notes, everybody goes away, the cards on the board grow, then the cards on the board fall. And that's the nature of game development. It's certainly in my studio. Then you got these guys. This is the computer graphics team, the programmers. You can see Chuck, Antonio, Tim, Joshua Clay, one of the very talented new guys. He did this piece of art that's on our shirts. And then Danai, also a very talented guy. And then, of course, the guy wielding the katanas is the guy that calls the shots in the studio. This is my executive producer, Mark Weyna. I can't say enough about this guy. He's my right-hand guy. His office is right next to mine. He runs the studio for me, and he chases details. And when we were doing, you know, I'm not supposed to, I'm chief creative officer, I'm not supposed to be designing games. So when I had to step in to design Deadpool, Mark, Deadpool wouldn't be here without Mark because Mark went to a million meetings on my behalf. He walked into my office a thousand million times and he said, what do you want to do about this? And then I would say, I think we should do this, this, and this. And then he would just go out and get it done. And so you can't, you know, you can't do what we do without a mark because he's a guy that runs around the company getting things done. And I think that's really his description of his job even though his official title is executive producer. And then Olivia sits on the other side of the studio from them and, you know, when boys with swords start playing with their swords, she's going have something to say. You can see the look on her face like, what are you guys doing over there with swords? Here's some more guys. One half of the Kizzabat boys over there and I think, is that a Decepticon shirt, Mike? Autobot. Autobot, sorry. It's an Autobot shirt, yeah. You know, and then the other two guys in the middle, Mark Guidarelli, we call him Guido, he's really my studio tech director. So he's responsible for all of the system side technology in the games and any of the new technology initiatives. And for example, this coming year, your Stern Pima machines will hopefully be online. And when you're, and that's one of the initiatives that he's working on right now. So, you know, your code updates are going to happen sort of like they do for your computer where if you tell the machine, you know, yes, you have the right to update, then at 2 o'clock in the morning while you're sleeping, it will download the code and all that nonsense with USB sticks and SD cards and stuff will go away. There's some other stuff beyond that that's coming that's even cooler, but first step is to kind of get us to that point. Also in this picture, Mike Vinikour. Mike runs the test program, both internal and external tests. He monitors a bunch of games that go out on the street, different types of locations. He also runs the internal test program, when we start testing the games internally to make sure we have fun, great games. Mike is also a great pinball player. Mike is a very interesting guy. His background, he started testing games for my friend Ed Boon on the Mortal Kombat team back in the early days of Mortal Kombat. He's a gamer through and through. He has tested everything, but his love is pinball. And so he has been a huge contributor to the rules evolution and a bunch of our current games. I'm trying trying very hard to make our studio be all the good things that I experienced at Ballet Midway and not the bad things. So you all have heard me talk about the competition of teams at Ballet Midway and how they were kind of like rogue street gangs. And I don't want rogue street gangs. I want, you know, I want one unified Stern Pinball, everybody pulling together, everybody making great stuff. And so there are rules and fun contributions from throughout the studio in every game we make. Every guy plays the games, every guy makes comments, the team has to act or should act on those comments. And that's how the games that you know and love have gotten to be so fun, right? The guy in the corner on the phone is Steve Martin, another sort of behind the scenes heavy duty contributor. He's the production art director, works for Greg Ferraris. He worries a lot about how to get the art to all of the different, I mean, you know, we do so many kinds of art, right? We do, you know, probably ten different kinds of decals and we do, you know, we print on plastics in all kinds of different ways. We print on glass. We print on all these different things. We print on wood. And every one of those vendors, every one of those printing requirements is different. And Greg and Steven basically wrestle with all of that and they do a tremendous heroic job. I mean, it's a couple of guys. And Greg has a larger role in that he's the art director, so he manages every project artist that's working on a project. And he manages, he helps out the sales and marketing guys and, I mean, just a lot of stuff. But really, really talented crew. More shots inside the studio. The tall tops of the walls are lined with our playfields. We have a thing where the playfields near the designer's offices ring the studio and the playfields near the designer's door are that designer's playfields. And so when Keith Elwin joined us, for the longest time there was an undecorated white wood above his office and then finally once he shipped his first game we took down the undecorated white wood and gave him a real decorated Iron Maiden. So we call these the party lights and they're constantly cycling and turning and changing colors and stuff. And so we, you know, we did that just because we could. This is on the left side. These are just some random images from the development of Deadpool. This mess on the left is my desk and that boom box, I'll talk a little bit later about the Deadpool cassette tape, but But once, you know, we thought, hey, this will be, you know, I wanted to do this, the LP that the LE guys get. I'm going to talk about that a little bit later. But I also, so then just kind of because I thought, well, the LP is really cool because it's like Jeremy art and vinyl is really hot right now. And we're going to make it red transparent vinyl. And so I thought, that's awesome. And then I thought, but on the dash of the Chimichanga truck, Deadpool would have a Deadpool's mixtape, and it would be a cassette. And so, you know, we made the cassette, and we made all this stuff, and then we realized we have no way to play this. Who's got a cassette anywhere? So Jerry Thompson shows up, you know, and Jerry, I don't know if you guys know, but Jerry's in the room there. Jerry does a lot, he's the sound director for almost all our stuff, and he's done a remarkable job. And he's a lot like the art director, a lot like Greg Ferreris. He manages a lot of different talent, like he manages composers and producers and sound effects guys, et cetera. And he's also, he contributes to that mix. He mixes the games. He does a lot of that sort of stuff. And he's also, by the way, he's also the voice of the R&B tune in Deadpool. So Tanya and I call him Jerry White, not Barry White. And then on the right side, Zombie Yeti showed up with a giant Deadpool for me when we shipped the game and gave it to me. And that's my reaction, like, holy crap, what is this thing? It's pretty cool. Again, this is the studio and this is that wall that you saw with all the guys standing around. By the way, everyone on the Internet, pay really close attention because if you get this video, if you zoom in there and deconstruct these cards, you're going to know what the next game is. And then more of the Deadpool insanity. I mean, when we launched this game, it sort of took on a life of its own. And so the guys, Shane Nayan, who is the owner of AC Goji, one of the big pinball locations on the West Coast, one day said to me, I'm sending you four katanas. I want you to sign them. They're going to be the trophies for my launch party. So I'm like, okay, so these are signed katanas. I signed them on the top, and Tanya signed them down on the blade, and Shane gave them away at the AC Goji launch party. This is just a random collection of images. Here's our good friend, Jack Danger, wearing, you know, as Deadpool, with a special package, a special Deadpool package. And then we had the young ladies from Bells and Chimes come in and do a live podcast when they played Deadpool Premium. And that was a lot of fun, you know, a completely different perspective on, you know, did we make a fun game or not. These are the coasters that were given away at the Logan Arcade launch party here in Chicago. And then this is the crew that showed up wearing Deadpool shirts at the AC Goji launch party for Deadpool. And then this is a T-shirt that I got from the guys in Minneapolis who ran, you know, Tilt Pinball Bar from their Deadpool launch party. launch party. So I could bore you with like 30 slides like this because those launch parties went on all over the country and people sent me all kinds of things. So I have like, I have more Deadpool t-shirts than I think I can ever wear in all kinds of different ways. Okay, so here's a little sneak preview of a feature that we're working on right now that you're going to see in some future code release. It was this guy's idea. This is Brett Z Rubin. He's in the room. He's one of our other very talented programmers. Brett came to us from the NetherRealm studio, my friend Ed Boon's Mortal Kombat studio for now, for Warner Brothers. And one day he came to see us with this crazy idea about doing something with, so watch this movie. So there's Wolverine, you know, and he's like chowing down on turkey. And then some more things happen and, you know, all of a sudden it's berserker rage hit the spinner mode. And then Wolverine will throw turkey drumsticks at ninjas. Because, I mean, why wouldn't you? So, yeah, and that's, you know, see how you're all laughing? That's when he showed it to me, I laughed and I said, that has to go in the game. So I'm blessed to have this very talented crew of guys. Okay, so now you make the game, and this is the beauty to me. This is like one of my favorite things, right? We are a real deal American manufacturer. We manufacture Pima machines, and we ship them all over the world. And I love seeing this. I love coming in in the morning and walking from the parking lots in the back of the building. I walk through the factory. I see what they're making, this hub of activity, these people buzzing. How many, did anyone here go through on the factory tour? Yeah, so a lot of you saw that, right? So that's my good morning when I walk in, and I love it. I think it's like one of the most amazing things. These people are great. And then this is also one of my favorite slides. Look at these countries that we have shipped Deadpool to. China, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Australia, Norway, Canada, Robert Englunds, South Africa. And there's a ton more that I don't have up here. But I walk the line where the boxes are lined up, and I just take photographs of these boxes. We're an American manufacturer. We have roughly 300 people in the factory and another 70 people maybe on the other side of the factory. Of those 70 people, probably 45 of them, 50 of them work for me in product development. So we're a relatively small company. However, we also have, you have to think about the fact that pinball machines are made out of steel and glass and plastic and wood. And so the extended enterprise of Americans and people in this country that we employ is substantially larger than that because we buy steel and wire and wood and all of that stuff comes to us from places that are here and are supplying us with all of those things, all the different kinds of plastics, all the different kinds of decals and art and all that stuff. And I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud that we put people to work and we make a cool thing that people want. And then this is also very satisfying to me. These are photos from my Facebook page. I don't know who these people are. I just thought this is really cool. This is really cool to see these kids, you know, digging the game. Okay, so the, here's the mix tape, right? This is like the, you know, we have how many tunes on it, Jerry, 11? Eleven tunes, four of them are the custom vocal tracks that we talked about And they really funny you should listen to the lyrics And so the premium guys are getting their tapes their tapes come in the cash box We intend as soon as the LE guys get their vinyl we intend to put the playlist up on the Stern website and anyone, you don't have to buy anything, you can just download it and you can put it on any modern device like, you know, your phone or whatever it is, you know, your car, wherever it is that you're going to do it. We've had a little issue with the disc maker. This is the album cover for the 12-inch LP. And one of the funnest things about this, and I don't know if I can zoom in here. Oops, I guess that's all I could do. Executive producers, George Gomez and Tanya Kleiss. So I have now produced a record album. So we invented, you know, here's all the credits for all the different tracks. And by the way, my good friend Vince Ponerelli, who's a very talented musician, composer, and guitarist, who was also, you know him as the voice of the mummy in Monster Bash. And he was the lead sound designer on Monster Bash. And he's a big shot now. He works for a big video game company on the West Coast. And when we were doing this thing, this album, I called him up and I said, Hey, Vince, have you ever been published on an album? And he said, No. And I said, Well, guess what? He said, Write me four tunes and you can be. So he did. and he goes, at first he was like, dude, I am like, so I've got so much work. And I said, yeah, I know, but you can do this in this weekend. And so I'm like, no, no. So very talented guy, went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. He's the real deal. And so he wrote four of these tracks. So I was starting to tell you, are there any LE owners in the room? Oh, there you go. All right, so we owe you an LP. and it's coming. We've had a, you know, when you call up disc makers, disc makers are a relatively good-sized vinyl, you know, record producer company, and they produce all kinds of things. But we don't exactly get put in front of Lady Gaga. So we're in a very long queue to try to get our 500 albums. I'm praying that I can get it to you by Christmas. I will get it to you. But honestly, that's what's going on. And I hope, Internet, please hear me. You'll get your albums as soon as we have them. And then everybody else will get their stuff. OK, so that was the making of Deadpool. And now I'm going to cover some Stern business. So we don't like to ship unfinished games any more than you like to receive unfinished games. Sometimes the demands of business, the demands of doing what we have to do to continue to make pinball machines, make us ship games in an unfinished state. I've said this before. I've said this. I said it in Boston. I've said it in Texas. I've said it at a bunch of the shows. But I like to remind people of that. And I've been trying very hard to get us on track, to cross off all of the unfinished games. And so this year, we have done substantial code updates. We have updated Guardians, Aerosmith, Star Trek. Batman will very soon be at 1.0. You know that we released, I think it was 9.8 this weekend. Star Wars, ACDC, Iron Maiden. Keith mentioned that there may be another polish release on Iron Maiden. Deadpool 1.0 is around the corner, believe it or not. Mr. Kleiss is going to deliver on this. I've been pushing for, you know, let's create, you know, great Christmas presents. Let's create great Thanksgiving weekend presents. So we're going to try that. KISS is actually forthcoming, meaning that you're going to get your long-awaited KISS update with all your stuff. And I don't mean like six months from now. I mean that like it is right around the corner. So KISS guys, please stop writing on the, every time I do a code release for another game. Where's my KISS code? Because you're going to get it. And I'm sorry it's taking this long. Ghostbusters is delayed, absolutely delayed. And so, now, let's understand how these things happen. Let's understand a little bit about the teams. When we do a Batman update and a guy jumps on the Batman update announcement and he says, you know, where's my Ghostbusters code? Lyman Sheets is not doing your Ghostbusters Update. When we do a Deadpool release, Tanyo Klyce is not doing your Ghostbusters Update. So the guy that can do your Ghostbusters Update is the Ghostbusters developer. And if the Ghostbusters developer has been assigned, if he's been assigned to something else by the company, then we have to kind of wait until there's a break in his schedule in order to do it. And I'm sorry it's like that. Some games we have to pay more attention to because they went out in a greater state of disrepair, if you will. But Ghostbusters is a game that has an insert that doesn't do as much as it should, and it has a hint of a mode on the instruction card that could be more complete. It also needs some polish, and it needs a few other things. But it's not, it is one of the most popular games we've made. We've sold a lot of them. I think people like to play it. It's done pretty well everywhere. And so I have to make difficult decisions sometimes for the greater good. And the decision is I need that developer working on the game that he's going to release soon. And then And maybe we can put him on the Ghostbusters update. I hope you understand that. I'm being honest with you. I'm telling you how it is. And it's the world I live in. I wish that I could give you all of it at once. The one thing I will tell you is that we've tried very hard to cross them off. And some of these are very complete games now. And we probably won't revisit them. And also, I think that we are going to have are getting much better at shipping you things that are pretty complete. I think Deadpool went out in pretty good shape. I think Iron Maiden went out in pretty good shape. And our intent is to do that. Batman will soon hopefully be complete. And you know that Batman has turned out to be everything that we promised you it was going to be. I think it is an epic game and I think that Mr. Sheets has done an amazing, just absolutely remarkable job with the game. And if you haven't played one recently, you need to find one that's got latest code and you need to spend some time with it. So that's what I've got. I will take questions. Don't pull any punches. Ask me whatever you want. bit. First of all, we're really kind of light agile, meaning that we're not true, you know, we're not true, like an, you know, I mean, organizations take years to learn agile. We've sort of made this up from the framework of agile. It works for us. It's very, it's pretty light, but it's what we can do. We're a small, you know, we're a small shop and I can't dedicate a guy to Agile. So I wish I could, but I can't, right? So to answer your question, the reason to think into the games in detail is not because we have any thought that we're going to be right, okay? The very first thing I'm going to tell you about game development is no one, one can actually predict fun in their heads, including guys that have done it many times, myself included. Guys that have done it many times can get a lot closer than guys that haven't done it. But the reality is that I want the teams to think into things so that at the back end, once you have the entire framework of a game, you can iterate to make it fun because that's what it takes to make it fun. You cannot make fun if you do not iterate. So none of those storyboards predict fun. None of that agile predicts fun, right? Fun is all those guys standing around that game every day and all the details that go into creating it and making it fun. We, every game in the studio goes through a phase where it is no fun. Every single game. There was Mark Guidarelli, when we told him the shipping schedule for Deadpool, he couldn't contain himself. He literally laughed out loud. Like, you guys are crazy. You're not going to do this. But it takes this intense focus of the team iterating and trying things. And no, no, not that. Like this. And you have to be able, you know, you've heard all the things about rapid prototyping and all that stuff. All that stuff is about getting to the right answer quickly. That's what it's about. Anybody else? Similar question, because Gary has said certain employees play the games a few minutes a day. have you George have you found any body or group of people who tend to be pretty good proxies for how the game is going to turn out meaning if this person sees a problem there probably is going to be a problem yeah all my senior developers all my senior developers are pretty darn good they're pretty darn good at telling you when something is or isn't. It doesn't mean that they're flawless. It just means that game design, like all, like every other thing in the world, is, requires practice. And so when you've shipped a lot of games, been in a lot of places, tried a lot of things, you know, I mean, and I get, you know, whenever we have, we have a, we have a network of friends, of powerful friends in the game business, right? You know, Eugene Jarvis comes over to have lunch, and when he does, we drag him into the studio and stand him in front of a game and say, what do you think? So, I mean, we have that network. That network extends because we've all been a lot of places and we know a lot of people, and so there's a bunch of trusted people that can come into the studio and play anything at any time. You know, the Sharp Brothers, I mean, a lot of people that know games make contributions to what we're doing and comments on what we're doing. Yes, sir. George, you've done a great job on Batman and Deadpool. My question was about more and more competitors coming into the market. Is that making you think differently or, you know, does it make any changes? No, I mean, I don't, like, I welcome everybody to come and make pinball machines. I think that I tell my guys this all the time. We keep our eye on our ball, the ball on our play field, and that's what we do. We're going to do what we do. We don't necessarily, we've never been very reactionary, right? I mean, you saw me take my time to get to an LCD screen because I wanted to do it my way. I wanted proprietary hardware. I didn't want a PC sitting on the bottom of the cabinet. I wanted proprietary hardware that could do an elegant, efficient, cost-effective thing, high performance, scalable. I wanted to be able to grow it. It's been all those things. It's gone through growing pains, no doubt, right? It took me that long to get a hardware set. And then it took me the ability, it wasn't about hanging a monitor in a backbox. It was about developing the motion graphics team. It was about getting that motion graphics team to the point where they could produce that, right? Because anybody can hang a monitor in a backbox, but who can do that, right? So it was about that. It was about, I had to get all the pieces in place. I've been a lot of places. You know, I was an executive producer at Midway Games. I made Xbox and PlayStation stuff for nine years of my life. I know a thing or two about video games. And I realized that, oh, my God, you guys are talking about putting a video game in the backbox. Well, I got to get some guys. And we got to do it the way it's done, right? George, I don't have a question. I just wanted to say that I, you know, we own a lot of those games and Kim here says that she wants a Deadpool now. But I just want to appreciate, we all appreciate the transparency and honesty of the code updates for all the games coming up. So as owners of most of those games, you know, really that's what we want to know is, you know, what the status is. If it's delayed, it's delayed. If it's coming, awesome. So we all appreciate the transparency and honesty that you're providing us. Thanks. Let's give George a round of applause for that. Thank you. Thank you. Forgive the wonkiness of the question, but I noticed on your desktop you had a seed of alias and that you had figurines in your SolidWorks assembly that looked like they'd passed through something other than the SolidWorks design process. Can you talk a little bit about how you got those in and how you connected the artwork to the production? Yeah, so, you know, there's no such thing as a one-tool solution, really. There isn't, as much as I would love it that there was. So we have so many CAD tools. It's one of the most expensive things in my budget every year, all the different seats. You know, I got guys working in ZBrush. I got seats of Fusion 360. I got Alias. I got, I mean, you name it, I've got it. I got AutoCAD. I got, you know, I got SolidWorks. I've got all kinds of stuff because there is no such thing as a one-tool solution. So you come out, you do this in this tool. You come out of that. You go to this. We have some interesting, we've gotten really good at, we've now developed after a lot of trial and effort and a lot of, really a very expensive struggle. We have a proprietary pipeline that gets our arted, you know, our more squishy things like the sculpts from, you know, the design state all the way to production. So, but it's taken some time. And to the point where a lot of these CAD companies that where we use their tools, they've started looking at what we're doing too because it's, you know, it's an odd thing, right? Not too many people have to do that transition, but we do. I think the toy guys have to do it, and I think that they have their own versions of our pipeline, you know? So. Okay, time for one more. Yes, sir. Hi, George. At Texas, you mentioned a new addition to your team, Brian Eddy. Any comment on, haven't heard anything or seen any pictures of him? Is he in a closet working away on his new game? he's working away on a game he's in the building yeah he's in the building about a couple times a week and he's got a team and he's working away and you're going to be I think you know I hope you really like what he's doing I have a you know I mean it's like really if you you look at my roster it's I'm very proud that you know I'm part of my job is to put this all-star team together and to fix all of these issues of process and existing within the structure of a manufacturing company and all that. And so I think getting the right guys in the right seats is something that someday... I mean, I want to tell people when I'm 90 in the nursing home that there was a moment in time when I had three hit games in the market that I designed in Batman, Monster Bash Remake, and Deadpool. cool. But I don't think that they're going to get equally excited when I tell them that I put together the Stern Pinball Studio and, you know, made sure that, you know, I hired great talent. I don't think, you know, that's not as glamorous, right? Okay, thank you very much. I appreciate. I have to tell you I appreciate your passion for the games. It's your passion for the games that allows me to make the games. And so I want to say thank you to you and I want to say thank you especially to anyone, you know, who's bought the games I've made and who's enjoying the games I've made. Thank you.