Hey, what's going on pinball land? Welcome to the Jersey Jack pinball podcast. My name is Ken Cromwell and I'm your host. As we get into the month of May, I wanted to take some time today and I wanted to air some conversations that I had with Jersey Jack pinball founder Jack Guarnieri, Elton John pinball lead programmer Bill Grupp, and of course the king of pinball master of flow and lead designer of Elton John Pinball, Steve Ritchie. So without further delay, I introduce to you Jersey Jack. All right, joining us on the Jersey Jack Pinball podcast, company founder, Jack Guarnieri. Jack, welcome back. Thank you, Ken. I appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate you coming in. How you been? Been great. Been great. Been a little bit busy lately with the release of Elton John. Always busy. That's good. It keeps me going all the time. Busy is good. Now, everybody knows, for the most part, your backstory. They know you've been involved in the industry going back 50 plus years. What I wanted to focus on today, if you're right with it, is talking about pinball licensing. OK, we're going to teach our competitors how to get. We'll see where it goes. I don't I don't know how that's going to work or how it's not going to work out. But there's a lot of questions that I think. Interesting subject. A lot of people are interested in. It is. I mean, and you are in charge or I shouldn't say in charge. You're running licensing here at Jersey Jack Pinball. All the themes, everything that we have is going through you. And I wanted to kind of get an idea of the mindset, the approach, maybe not so much of a deep dive, but just some general questions that I've seen asked in the public domain. I thought I'd throw them at you. What goes through your head when you're choosing a pinball license? What are some of the major factors that you're considering before you're going into sign on the dotted line and commit? Well, I probably won't hit all of them, but the first thing is that it needs to be something that appeals to everybody. You know, young, older, men, women, anybody. And it needs to be worldwide because our market is worldwide. Some things work well in the U.S. They may not work well in Europe. Sure, right. You know, let's say we made a baseball game or something like that. Or, you know, it's probably not going to sell too well in France. I mean, years ago they could get away with that. Different market, different times. I also need to have a licensor that understands what we're doing. And our category is a very small category. You know, it's not like Halloween costumes where they make millions of dollars. This is kind of a vanity category. And even though we spend a lot of money, it's not a lot of money typically to a licensor. Interesting. Yep. The other thing we need to find out if somebody in the company, a design team, is interested in doing the license. There have been times where we could get certain licenses and we couldn't get anybody interested in doing them. So we passed. Another thing is we need to have assets. You know, I stuck that big 27-inch monitor in the backbox. Guess what? So it's like programming four games because you have light shows, you have sound, all the integration, choreography, you have video. So you need assets. So if you don't get movie clips or other animation or assets for it, it's not as good a meal as the chef could cook in the kitchen. They can make something, but the more assets that I could get them, I think it makes a better game. going back for just a second, because I know that you did mention that you want the team to be interested in working in on the license that they're going to be dedicating perhaps one, one and a half, maybe even two years of time. Um, plus money. Yeah. Plus money. But how much of your personal appreciation for a pinball theme or license goes into that decision-making? Uh, sometimes, you know, I don't want to be selfish, but a lot of the, a lot of the theme ideas. They're popular culture, right? What's reflected in popular culture, what our demographic would like. Sometimes it's been, we've done games that our demographic didn't even know they would like, and we did it anyway. And let's say an unlicensed game like we did with Dialed In. You know, I wanted Pat to do an unlicensed game. I thought it would be cool. The market was asking for it as soon as we announced it was dialed in everybody hated the name you know the first time i saw pac-man the first time i saw donkey kong i thought there was silly names also but they grow on you you know that's what happens when you have something brand new it's like going to see your favorite band and then all of a sudden they break out a new album and they play a song and everybody gets up and goes to the bathroom they don't give it a shot you got to give it a chance and the people that gave dialed in a chance a lot of them it's their favorite game. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I noticed is that even when we were doing some polling and surveying here a while back and we were asking, you know, what kind of things interest you with the pinball theme? And we had, you know, movies or music. Original theme actually was the second most requested. I think the problem is when you talk about an original theme, every single person has an idea of an original theme that they would prefer. And not a whole lot of that's going to be coagulated into one common theme that everybody's asking. Right. And the old answer would be you call up a distributor in the UK and say, I'm doing a game based on space travel. Okay, let me see that. It's not like you're telling them about some famous space-themed movie or something like that. So that's a difference as well. This is your ninth license that you secured for Jersey Jack Pinball with Elton John. The first, right? The first being Wizard of Oz. Right. I know you have more licenses that are in the queue that that you have. And, you know, obviously, that's not for public knowledge as of yet. But has there been an evolution? Has it gotten easier for you at this point, like going through nine licenses? Or has there been an additional complexities that you've had to deal with? Like, how is that trending in regards to just kind of being able to execute? Well, when you do a music license, you have to deal with publishing and who owns the rights to master recordings. recordings and a lot of times it's different entities you could have three or four licenses for one song and then if you do a game that has 22 songs on it like guns and roses you need everything to line up with the master ip license so you don't want to start one clock ticking without the other clocks ticking and to get everybody on the same page it's like nailing jello to a tree uh sometimes i spend a couple of years getting a license and you know i might not be working on the one license, but who's out of town and who can't make it to a meeting and who doesn't want this and who wants that. You know, it's a process that's negotiating and it's gotten easier for me. I'll tell you why it's gotten easier for me. Licensors see the products that we make and they want us to make their game. There are other companies vying for licenses that I want. and I'm not going to brag, but it's easier for us to get them when they see what we make as compared to other choices out there. And there's nothing wrong with what anybody makes. They're making the best things they make, and we make the best things they make, and then the licensor chooses how they want their coveted, prized property, intellectual property represented. I mean, we're storytellers. So it's not just important to get a license that's popular. We want to tell the story of that license. And we do that through everything we do in the game. We do that through the artwork. We do that through the lighting. We do that through the animation. We do that through the video, the speech calls. I mean, Elton John himself did speech calls for the game. He and his husband, David Furnish, were very, very involved with the game development. They said, use this picture, don't use this picture. use this color in this way use this use that and they really understood what we were doing and they said that we captured his dna i mean we we told the story that millions of people um the soundtrack of their lives were told by elton john so we're very proud of the game and the game is a great team effort from steve and bill grubb and everybody that worked on the game So it's wonderful. And that's what a license gives you. License gives you those games at Christie's in New York City, okay, where millions of people. Let's talk a little bit about that because, I mean, that was record-setting dollars in an auction format for a pinball machine. And when we place dollar amounts on these games, it's an incredible charitable contribution. But two of those games each went for $200,000. The Christie's auction started off with a game that sold for about $70,000. Right. Right. And that's what a license brings. A license brings awareness from other people. There are Elton John fans. I'm on a couple of Elton John groups on Facebook and they don't know the pinball person. And they were writing that they saw Elton John at recently a Pintastic and somebody's buying a game. They never bought pinball before. And that's what it does. It brings people to to love something. Guns and Roses fans bought Guns and Roses games. Godfather fans bought Godfather. We are a market maker. We are not a market taker. So what that means is we create a market. When we develop a game, it opens up doors to new people in the world to discover pinball. And that's what we have to do. To get to really where we want to be, we need to sell games to people that don't have pinball machines. I love all the people that have pinball machines and are collectors and friends all these years that I'm in the business. and we have Jersey Jack pinball, but we need to be pinball evangelists. We need to tell people how cool the game is, how much fun it is, and all the things that it brings to the table that are positive. With new pinball licensors, it seems that there are more licensors that are reaching out because they feel that a pinball machine would be a cool thing to rep their brand as part of their portfolio. How has that differed from starting with Wizard of Oz to now where you've got companies and brands and music bands reaching out to you and being like, hey, we want you to do what you did for X. Right. And it's very humbling because there are some big groups and big agents that I've spoken to. We can't do them all. We don't have the time or the money or the bandwidth, however you want to say it, to do it. I don't want to say this in like a snooty way. Not everybody deserves a pinball. Okay. Not everything is a pinball machine. What does that mean? He called me from a dog food company and wanted to make a pinball machine. There are people in the aftermarket that make one-off games. I saw some of them, and they're great. But commercially, we are putting a couple of million dollars into this. We're dedicating a team of people for a year and a half to two years. We're trying to feed our distributors, our vendors, and all the people that are in our ecosystem. There's thousands of people in our ecosystem that rely on us to make something great. And we can't sell junk. You know, if we could, our games would actually cost less. But there's a lot that goes into them, a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money for parts. And, you know, we need to make money, too. Well, the one thing that I've noticed just being here, because we always like to offer Jersey Jack pinball tours. If somebody's in the area, they're visiting from out of town. We've got a customer that just bought a game. They want to check out what's going on on the line. When somebody tours the facility and they see the amount of hands-on effort, this is one of the very few handcrafted, almost completely handcrafted products that I can really recall. When you go on TV and you watch how it's made and you see a lot of robots and automation and things being mass produced, where we're producing a lot of games, it's very handcrafted. And the amount of time and effort that goes in, station to station. I mean, a game could be on the line individually for 19, 20 hours per game as it makes its way through. It's a huge process. It's a huge process. It's very labor-intensive, built with love, really love, not even passion, more than passion. Love. I mean, the people that are involved making these games love what they're doing. Yeah, absolutely. They love making these games for our customers. Absolutely. And the people playing them. Absolutely. So unfortunately this year you were not able to make TPF. And from the way that I understand it, you had already booked travel plans before TPF had changed the date. Right. After ownership had kind of transferred over at TPF. But you were at Pentastic just recently here a couple weeks ago. Great show, Pentastic New Robert Englunds. Gabe, who's running that show out there, you were out there with Mike at Automated, who's pinballs.com, our big distributor out there. but you also went out there with Steve Ritchie, Mark Seiden, and Bill Grupp. Can you talk a little bit about the feedback that you had? Because I think this is the first time that you were at a U.S. show where the game was on the floor and you were in attendance and you were able to kind of get some feedback. Yeah, that's true. Expo was the launch. The first game this year. Well, you know, Expo's hard because everybody's piled in and they just saw it. The feedback for Elton John was just phenomenal. Now, personally for me, every game we've done, there's been some degree of criticism. Or somebody said, you know, this shot is this, or this is too floaty, or this is too that. All I had were people coming up to me and Steve and Bill, Mark, Mike, I got to buy one of these games. And I had somebody, when I was sitting with Mike, I actually sat down for a few minutes. the guy traded three games to Mike to buy one CE. It's a phenomenon, I've got to tell you. Because when you play the game, you feel good. You smile. The shots are really smooth. Every game should shoot like this game. Yeah, well, I mean, and you remember we were at IAPA back in November. I mean, that's not necessarily a pinball show. It's more of an industry show. And you can get everything from new roller coaster wheels to building a water park. But I remember I was speaking to a couple. They were from Australia and they had owned pinball machines from different companies, including ours. I think Wizard of Oz was the first game they had bought Jersey Jack wise. And I was talking to the gentleman's wife and she said, you know, I love pinball. I kind of know what to expect from all the pinball companies and I'm fine with it. But she goes, when I step up to Elton John, when I'm done playing it, it just I realize it just makes me happy and it makes me smile. And you had just said, you know, it's making people smile. It's such an important part of the experience overall, something that makes you smile and happy and wants you to come back because who doesn't want that feeling? Right. And look, we're in a crazy world and you want to come home and you want to relax. You want to go out. You want to relax. You want to have fun. When I find what your friends want to have something that's relatable. One of our great customers, Medi Pierre in Paris, he got his game the other day and he calls me on WhatsApp video. and his two kids, they're like 11-year-old twins, one boy, one girl, they don't know Elton John. They are singing Rocket Man to me. They're singing Rocket Man to me in half English, half French. It's so, I get chills. It was so great because you reaching people and that what you doing People come to expect a lot of things from our company and from our people They expect something really great They expect something innovative. They expect something different. They expect new technology. To me, we're our own competition because we really push the envelope. People here and vendors, all of the people, they really push. And that's what we thought in the beginning. You know, with Wizard of Oz, I said many years ago when I was asked why what we did, I said, well, you know, we didn't put the kitchen sink in the game. We put the whole plumbing department in the game. That's right. Yeah. We're still doing it. Look, for 200 grand, you could have bought one of the games at Elton John's Academy Award watch party. For $15,000 for a CE, you have a bargain. That's true. You can get a couple of those for each room of the house probably at about $15,000. Well, I'll tell you what, Jack. I mean, very excited to see what you've got cooked up with future licenses for Jersey Jack Pinball. Thanks for taking the time to come in, and it's always good having you here in Chicago. I'm happy to be here, and it's home. Thanks, Jack. Thank you. All right. Joining us on the Jersey Jack Pinball Podcast as our special guest, lead software on Elton John, Mr. Bill Grupp. Bill, welcome to the show. Thank you. How are you? I'm doing well. Riding the wave. Yes, but not to crash. Congratulations on the release of the game. Elton John Pinball has been performing well, a lot of great feedback. And I know that you've been involved heavily in all of our other Jersey Jack Pinball games going back to Willy Wonka. But the last time you were an official lead on a game was actually 1995 when Williams released to Congo. That's correct. Yeah. I figure every 27 years is a good time. You're in the rotation. Yes. No, it's exciting. I mean, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the feelings you might have had when when you were reached out to and given the chance to kind of lead a Steve Ritchie game and it being Elton John. Terrified. Absolutely terrified. No, it was it was, you know, it was exciting theme for me. exciting license and, you know, my first time actually working with Steve. So I fully realized how much work it was going to be. And, you know, with lots of help, I was able to make something I think is pretty good. The feedback that we've been getting on the game, especially for those that have actually, you know, sat down and had some time in playing, it's been remarkable. What do you think it is about the rule set that makes it so approachable and that is offering that level of enjoyment for people that are experiencing the game? I don't have one answer for that. I think the best answer I can give is it's understandable. Really focused on trying to make what you see in the lights and what you see in the display and the sound effects easy to understand what is going on and giving you good feedback when you do something good. Some of it's got to be just luck because we didn't plan it to be as good as it is. We were trying to make a good game, and I think it's one of those where the sum of the parts has really come out far better than we could have hoped. Yeah, 100%. I know right now I'm a big fan of light shows and the choreography that goes along with the rules, the sounds, the audio, obviously, and then the lights almost unparalleled on this game. And I know that it's one thing to be the lead programmer on a game, but there's a big supporting cast, too, I imagine. Oh, it's huge. It's huge. It's huge on every game. I mean, all modern games take a lot of talent and people to produce. They're complicated. And, you know, just on the programming side for this game, besides myself, we had Joe Katz, great programmer here at Jersey Jack, really dedicated to making the best game that you possibly can. He helped out quite a bit with the rules. And he was a great person to just spitball and storyboard and come up with ideas. we would spend quite a bit of time talking through rules, talking through ideas for the game. Duncan Brown, I share an office with Duncan. He did a lot of the lamp effects, did work to get the topper going. The topper for the CE is a device that we never used before. So he dug in and figured out how to make a disco ball, something that our system can talk to. and now if we want to do some other DJ device if we ever want to add a fog machine to a pinball machine we can talk to fog machines why not we got a couple of new guys in our department Jason and Taylor are new software engineers and they started out when they walked in the door with this project in the middle and they were able to help out both writing some rules, running lamp effects, display effects So, you know, that's just the software side. When we think about audio, too, you've got Pierce Pierce Colbert, who is on board as audio engineer on this project. Yeah, he's a new guy for us. Never worked in pinball before. Very talented. Got up to speed very quickly on what it takes to make a pinball machine. Luckily for this game, he didn't have to write a lot of music because we had Elton John's music. Yeah, for sure. But he had a lot of work to do on sound effects, a lot of work to do on speech, trying to make that entire package sound cohesive, sound the way it does. I mean, he walked into something and was able to get up to speed very quickly. I suppose I can ask Pierce this too at some point, but I mean, going back to sound effects, something as simple as maybe a spinner sound or the sound of a ball hitting a target. But is that something that comes out of a catalog of audio noises that we're selecting from? Or is that some of this made from scratch where you're creating brand new fresh audio for those sound effects? For some games, it is out of a sound effects library. But a lot of the sounds for this game were custom made by Pierce. For the sole reason of having them match the key that the music is in. Ah, interesting. Okay. So when you hear sound effects that happen on like the Jets and they have a musical theme to them, each of those is matched to the key of the song that's currently playing. So those are all custom things that he had to do for this particular game. And again, trying to make the sound effects sound good along with the Elton John music so we're not totally stepping on the music that we paid a lot of money to use. Right. And then you had the unique experience of working with Elton John for call-outs, call-outs for Elton John in this game. Yeah. I mean. How does that happen? Well, it starts with the licensing agreement, and that was on the list from the beginning that he would do call-outs for our game. But it was not until late in the project that we actually got them because he was on tour the entire time we were making the game. Right. It was the farewell Yellow Brick Road tour. Right. So that tour started in 2019, I believe. Okay. And was interrupted by COVID and then restarted 2021. And then they had dates to complete all the way through, I believe, June of 2023. Okay. So we're in the middle of this project, and he was not available. He was on the road touring. And so we were going back and forth with the licensor on how to get his voice into the game. We actually sent him a digital recorder and a microphone so that he could record wherever he was at the time. It turns out that he actually had some studio time scheduled for his Rocket Club podcast, and he took some time out of that. and what was really cool when we got that recording back was you know a lot of times we do these recording sessions with with the artist from a movie or from a you know from a tv show or something it takes a bit of coaching to get the you know the sound you want for pinball to get the you know the the context of what you're saying for pinball correct but i mean we sent him a script and literally he pressed record and knocked out the entire script, and it is amazing when you hear the whole thing. Yeah, it's exciting. You can tell that he's enthusiastic and he's absolutely not phoning it in, so to speak, with the thought and the cause. And, I mean, I'm sure it's part of his experience in show business, but it was literally he turned it on and knocked it out of the park. It was amazing to me. Going back real quick to the light shows, I know on Guns N' Roses it seemed like you all had kind of split up the GNR songs. And each one of you might have had three or four songs or five songs that you were responsible for as far as coding the lamp effects. You had mentioned Duncan Brown. Did he do most of those lamp effects for the songs or did you have more people that contributed? He did a lot of the lamp effects for the songs. Taylor and Jason each took on a few. So, yes, we did divide up the work. And fewer songs in this game than Guns N' Roses. So that helped a little bit, but still had to spread out the work. It was still a lot of work. So if I recall, this is the first time that you had worked, and you had worked in the same company as Steve Ritchie. I had the office across the hall from him for years. Right. But it's the first time that you worked on a game with Steve, and then obviously you were the lead on this first project with him. How did that go, Phil? um it was it was fun it was fun i you know i had no idea what to expect with steve um we had a lot of laughs along the way but it's fascinating to watch his process okay um i've worked with you know easily a half dozen other game designers before across my career and the way he approaches designing a pinball play field i think is different than anybody i've ever worked for. Um, how so he is, um, you know, meticulous about getting the shots good, getting them right. Um, and you know, you can tell he, he lives this, right. He, I can tell, you know, he, he dreams about this stuff when he goes home. I mean, it's, there's no little detail that he doesn't want to touch on that play field to get it to work just the way he wants it. And he really works to try and integrate all of the, ideas from the license into the game. I remember him asking me questions about, you know, what do I think about this idea? Do you think we can work this in? And it's, you know he goes around to everybody that's on the team and asks those same questions. Yes. Yes, he does. And I mean, probably throughout the building. People that don't even work on a team he's probably asking. He's very open to feedback. And he's, you know, he's trying to make the best game that we can. And I'd say other people didn't do that, but it was fascinating just watching the way that he did it in this game. And then you have the other side where we have this sculpture, the Tiny Dancer. It's on the play field and it's a molded, painted piece. When we started designing that, we were 3D printing those to get the scale right and get it to spin right. And Dan Maltzer is the guy who would print those for us. And I'd see Dan on the way out in the evening and he'd say, oh, I'm going to print you a new Tiny Dancer and you'll have it in the morning. And I'm thinking, oh, great, that's cool. And I'd come in in the morning and there would just be this little stub where the Tiny Dancer was supposed to be. And I'd go to Dan and I'd say, you know, what happened to the Tiny Dancer? He says, oh, I just put it on last night right before I left. And, well, it turns out Steve would break it off the first thing in the morning when he'd get to work on the game. Take the Tiny Dancer off. um no not not not take it off he would knock into it because it's this you know brittle 3d printer oh yeah 3d printed tiny dancer down yeah so i've got this whole collection of broken tiny dancers broken tiny dancers i think one of the more fun aspects of the hobby and it goes back into programming a lot are just little hidden gems or easter eggs that you'll find in pinball machines and i can go through a list of it off the top of my head four or five that i've appreciated over the years, and even here as well. Did you put anything in there that we're going to find out later? Are there any little hidden Easter eggs, anything you can share for us, or maybe a point in the direction where we should be looking? There are some cool things that we put in. I'm not a huge Easter egg fan. To me, it's cool to include things that are fine details that people will notice if they're really paying attention. so the easter egg thing is not necessarily my my you know my cup of tea but to give an example one of the things that we did on this game there's a song called your sister can't twist yes um and if you are a elton john fan that's on the yellow brick road album and the song that immediately follows it is saturday night's all right for fighting um and if you if you've listened to the album, like the vinyl album, and it's the first song on the second side, I think, Sister Can't Twist, and it ends. It's a short song. It's just over two minutes. I think it's the shortest song in our game. It ends, and one beat later, it immediately goes into Saturday Night's All Right for Five. Okay. And in our game, you pick a song, and then when that song ends, it randomly picks the next song for you. so you don't have to worry about stopping your play. It automatically goes to the next song. And the game will automatically, if you pick your Sister Camp twist, when that ends, it does that same thing. It's one beat and you are into Saturday night. You're right into Saturday night. So if you are the Elton John fan who's played through that album, that will immediately just be something you'll recognize right there. That's really cool. I like that when you're selecting your song, you're able to hear that whole song all the way through. It's not going to be cut off necessarily when a ball ends and you're starting over, you're getting the full experience. And with the license, we have full-length songs for the entire catalog. Yeah, the full studio masters for all 16 songs, yeah. Let's switch gears for just a second. I know that you're in a good spot right now with Elton John code-wise. You're actually taking time when you're going back and you're revisiting Guns N' Roses and you're working on a soon-to-be-released code update. Is there anything that you can share on that? It's been an interesting project. Um, revisiting something from a couple of years ago, it's, it's always, uh, you know, a little bit of work to get back up to speed on something from a few years ago. Um, and I always forget, I mean, how much there is in that game. It's, uh, there may not be another game like that again, because that was another thing that we did during COVID and we had nothing else to do, but do software for a pinball machine. So I'm trying to really listen to people's feedback on the game and incorporate ideas that the owners and players have made, trying to make the scores more balanced across the different songs and balanced across the album modes and stuff like that. So it tedious and hopefully it be something that people really enjoy to play And I look forward to hearing what they say is i mean are you is that something that you enjoy doing going back I know like you said you got to kind of get re When you're in the moment in the flow of the design and programming of a game, I imagine that things are naturally coming. Is it something that you kind of transition to and you're in a good spot with this? I wouldn't say I enjoy going back and revisiting old code. You're not enjoying that, huh? But, you know, it's one of those things where you look back and sometimes you're staring at something going, why did I do this? It's just it doesn't make any sense. But but, you know, a little bit of time up to speed. And for this project, it's really interesting to me because I really have a better understanding of the rules for all the songs now. So when we wrote the game, again, those were divided up among the different programmers, and the rules for the songs were written by different people. So to me, I have a much better understanding of how the rules work for every song, whereas I only had a view of the songs that I wrote at the time. And now, again, I'm seeing the total picture. It's just amazing to me how much stuff there really is in this game. I think that's cool. I mean, going back, you know, with Guns N' Roses, it might be one of those unique situations where you've got so many programmers that, you know, are capable of leading games or have led games with name recognition and experience, all kind of coming up with individual rule sets and effects for individual songs or modes. Right. It gives a lot of variety to the way the game plays, you know, all within the, you know, the concert experience that we wanted for that game. But, you know, my job now is to try to make those, you know, equalized across the songs so that no matter what song you pick, you don't have a disadvantage or a deficit in points and scoring. And I completely appreciate the fact that you're taking feedback from the community and, you know, we're a few years removed from the official launch of the game, but still going back and listening to that feedback and implementing another code update, I think, goes a long way. Yeah, I mean, it's still a bunch of work, but I've taken the time to get myself reacclimated to this, and now I can better evaluate. Somebody says, oh, I'd like this feature. Wouldn't it be great if you could do this? It's really easy for me now to look at it and say, well, that's probably a good idea. We can incorporate that pretty easily. It's a good time to do it now that I'm already back and trying to adjust the scoring. And when do you anticipate the release on that code? I think it's in beta right now. So if you're in the Jersey Jackpinball beta program, which you can opt in on right within the menu of the game. Right on the game. There's a setting in the advanced network settings to opt into beta. And then you can, if you want, we have a beta channel on Telegram. And if you're more interested in just playing, you can opt into that also. That's a little more work. You'd have to research online how to find that. But we're on our fifth beta release for the GNR updates. We'll probably be maybe two more and hopefully finished by the end of June. That's great. That's great. Are we going to see you and Steve working together on his next one? Far as I know. So, yes. Anything you can share on your personal involvement when you kind of think of this game that maybe nobody knows about? A little interesting story or tidbit? Okay. Well, one of my favorite stories is how the topper came about for the collector's edition. Topper Talk. Topper Talk, yeah. Jersey Jack Pinball Podcast. So about the time that Steve had completed most of the work on the play field, the artwork had been mostly approved, and you get to the part in the project where you start thinking about what to do for the topper. Every collector edition game that we've done has a topper. and it's kind of like a contest to come up with the next coolest topper. Coolest topper, sure. You want to be cooler than the last game. And so we're in that phase where I'm doing my work, right? I've got the rules and the choreography and the lamp effects and all this stuff that I have to worry about. But Steve's kind of at the end of his cycle, and the last big thing he's got to do is come up with an idea for a topper. Right. and he's, you know, he's... I can tell that you're recollecting this. Yeah, oh yeah. It's going through your head. I'm enjoying the facial expression. I wouldn't say he's burned out, but he's used up all of his ideas, right? He's got this cool piano on the play field. He's got the crocodile on the rocket. And, you know, the first thing is like, oh, we could put a rocket and a crocodile up on the top bird. And he's just, you know, he's looking for something to do for... Yeah, but you've got a rocket and a crocodile on the play field. Right, we already got that. Right. We got that. And he's like, well, we could just put a piano up on top and Elton could play piano. And I'm like, we already have a piano in the game. So he's asking everybody. He's going around, what do you think we should do for a topper? What can we do for a topper? I just, I have no idea. I'm so focused on just trying to get my job done. And he's, you know, he's trying to come up with the last little detail he needs to finish the game. And we have a standing lunch date. Every Tuesday we go out for tacos. and it's always the same place. It's close to work and good tacos. And so you go out for tacos and we walk in the door and they must have a little bit more nightlife in the restaurant than they do during the day because when we walked in, there's a – Nightlife at the taco place. At the taco place, yeah. All right. We walk in, there's this disco light that's hooked to the ceiling and it's on. Okay. Like they forgot to turn it off or the – And I think it's activated by the music, right? It just, it goes by the beat of the music. Right. And it's just, it's whirling away and there's lights all over the place. And all of us are just, they're staring at this light because it's just mesmerizing on the ceiling. Getting in the rhythm. And we're like, that's what we need right there. Wow. So the laser light show. That's right. Was the inception. Came from the Mexican restaurant. During taco day. And then, of course, you know, Steve looked up the model that was on the ceiling in a restaurant, and he ordered one, and we got it delivered. And it's, you know, by the time you pull it down from the ceiling, you know, it's like a 10-foot ceiling. Yeah, yeah. A little bigger, I imagine. It was huge. It wouldn't fit on top of the game and go in the box. So it took a little bit of work to find one that would actually fit in the box. The topper is impressive, just the amount of light that it throws. We were at Texas Pinball Festival, and I remember we were sitting in the booth, and we were talking about how did we want to be able to display the topper graphics because the ceiling is so high. And at Expo, we had that little kind of photography white circle that let you see kind of the graphics. It was attached to the backbox. This topper was throwing up on that 20- or 30-foot ceiling of TPF. It looked like a spaceship was landing in that place. It's pretty wild. So for those of you that are awaiting your Jersey Jack pinball collector edition Elton John, you're going to be pretty shocked with the topper. Yeah, it's amazing when it's in your house, too. Yes. Just the way it projects almost the entire ceiling in the room. It really does, because I'll play it in the arcade here, and I like to play with the lights off on every game that I play. And when that game's in there, it lights up the room. It sets the tone. It really creates an ambience that's pretty unique. And we were really lucky in being able to find a vendor that can make the laser disc for that, that shows our logos and shows the Elton John star and the Elton John logos and stuff. So it just really came together in a great package. I'm going to have to ask. I'm going to be talking to Steve here shortly. I'm going to see if he has any comments on the Mexican restaurant taco topper light show. That's great. Well, hey, look, congratulations. I really appreciate you took the time to sit down. And I know everybody's excited to see what you're going to be working on next. Thanks for going back and revisiting Guns N' Roses. And we'll be talking to you soon. Sure. Anytime. Thanks a lot, Bill. Joining us now on the Jersey Jack Pinball Podcast, the king of pinball, master of flow, and lead designer on Elton John Pinball. For Jersey Jack, it's the one and only Steve Ritchie. Steve, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks a lot. Great to be here. It's always fun podcasting with you. I've podcasted with you a few times in my podcasting career. And it's one of the moments that I always look forward to. I look forward to talking to you, too. We seem to have a good rapport. I would agree. I would agree with you. It's it's it's you've changed the dynamic here office wise with you reporting into the building every day and making pinball machines. So I appreciate it. It's been fun. Challenging. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, basically cool. It is cool. And speaking of cool, your latest game, which is out now, is Elton John pinball rave reviews. People that are playing it are loving it. From the shots to the rules to the artwork to the lighting, there's not a whole lot to really nitpick about on this game. How does it feel to get that feedback? It feels great. You know, I try to direct a team, but this team was a great team, just full of talent and very easy to work with. And we had a lot of fun, too. That's important. I mean, that fun is expressed in the play field when you play it. It really is because we enjoyed it, too. you know and we we went in saying we want to make the best pinball machine that's ever been made that's what we said in the very beginning so it sounds cliche when somebody says that i mean obviously everybody i would assume wants to make the best pinball machine that's ever been made but i've seen feedback on this game where people have literally said this might be the greatest pinball that's ever been made in the last 10 years in the history of pinball i mean that's got to feel amazing. It does, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Not everybody feels that way about the game. I'm just saying that was our goal. We wanted to make it spectacular. Was it cool to have Pinball Wizard as a song, like actually in a pinball machine? Is that something that you knew right away when Elton John was going to be the theme you were going to be working on? Was that one of the priorities, like you needed to have that song in the game? We definitely knew that we needed to have it. I could not apply too much thought about it because I was still, I'm trying to assemble everything that's going to go in the game to the best of my ability. But it became one of the most important songs, no question. And we, you know, we wanted video of it. We wanted the whole shot, definitely. So your friend and company founder, Jack Guarnieri, I know he brokered a lot of those deals to get those songs, not anything that he really missed. A lot of huge chart-topping hits from Elton John. Yeah, he got them all. And I'm really glad. It's Like some people mention songs, but, you know, I kind of run down the, you know, Billboard list and Rolling Stone best songs, you know, and I compiled the list. And so did, you know, Jack and his wife also. Other people got involved. But those songs there are his best-selling songs also. Well, and I would imagine, too, just because a song is an amazing song doesn't necessarily mean it's going to translate over to fitting into a pinball machine. So I think the songs that you have chosen within this game, I mean, they're all hard hitting Elton John songs. They are hard hitting. I think it's the height of juxtaposition. Oh, nice. When you are playing, you know, a fast game and your song is playing. It's kind of strange, but I'm used to it. I like it. It's OK. And with this game, too, when you come in and you select your song from the beginning, because it's the first thing that you're asked to do, it's a little bit different on the approach of that song playing through. Right. Yeah, you got to pick a song. If you don't, it picks one for you. But if you pick a song, there's so many to choose from. I think 16 plus Funeral for a Friend, Heart Lies Bleeding. All those songs are great, especially that one for powerful multiball feeling. And when you select your song, it's going to play through. It's not going to stop when your ball ends and restart. I mean, you're going to be listening to that entire studio track, right? You are, and it's, you know, for as long as you can play the ball. It's, I don't know, it's a good feeling. It is a good feeling. I remember when we had done a podcast, this is prior to both of our times working at Jersey Jack Pinball, and I had asked you about what drives you as a designer for themes, and you said, you know, you like fast, you like powerful, but you don't do cute. And this theme turns out it's not a cute theme. This is a rock and roll pin. No, it's definitely a rock and roll pin. It's not cute. And it's totally satisfying for me. In the end, I love the game. I think we all do here. Everybody on the team loves the game. It's just, it turned out great. And like I said, the team was great. Absolutely. You've been known in the past with your animatronics and kind of moving parts of the human anatomy. When did you realize that you needed to have that Elton John physical kind of piano playing mech in the game? Very early. It was one of the first things I drew. I wanted his hands to move on the keyboard and I wanted his head to turn and indulge the audience, point out people, whatever. We look across the play field and there's a lot of things going on. You've got the moving crocodile rock locking mech. You've got Tiny Dancer who rotates. You've got the piano mech with Elton John who's moving up and down. You also have the rocket for Rocketman multiball, which has the LED flame. One of the coolest things that I've seen, though, that you introduced for the first time, to my knowledge, I've not seen it on a pinball machine, is the micro LED scrolling marquee that's on the front side of Elton John's piano. That was a great acquisition. And I'm not responsible for it, although we did know that during his residence, during Elton John's residence in Las Vegas, he had monitors on the front of his piano and they showed fire and a bunch of other stuff. So we wanted that. But our electronics guy found the display. And as soon as he turned it on, we were blown away. Oh, my God, it's so bright and beautiful. And we actually backed off on the brightness because it could actually hurt your eyes. Now it's perfect. You see everything. It's just a very pretty thing. And what I love most about it is when you make the mid-ramp shot up to the piano and through, that thing sparkles. And then it cycles. I don't know. It just makes you feel great, like you accomplished something major. That sparkle effect is nice. In fact, sparkle is kind of a theme that goes on with the collector's edition and the platinum edition because you've got sparkle that's going to be on that play field on the collector's edition. But the radcals that are on both versions also have a sparkle effect. There's sparkle that are in the plastics of the CE. There's a whole lot of sparkle going on. Elton John sparkles. He does sparkle. He's a sparkly person. That's perfect. Yep. He's got sparkly clothes, man. I don't know. It all worked. Do you have anything in the wardrobe now that's Elton John-esque? Probably not. No? How about sunglasses? A long time ago, I used to have a Levi jacket with lots of sequins, you know, like a sheet of it. So sure that I used to play in, you know, perform in. And it's like I don't have that anymore. So we talk about drawing attention and drawing your attention to the game for collector edition owners. You've got one of the craziest toppers that I've ever seen with that laser light show effect. Talk to me a little bit about how does that come to fruition? Where do you get the idea that, hey, I'm going to put a party on top of this backbox and let everybody see it? Well, it's like when you go to see Elton John, there's light shows all over the place, mostly on the screen behind him. But we were at a Mexican restaurant nearby, and they had this big, huge thing with like two rotors on the end, probably like 15 inches wide. It spun and there was laser light coming out of it as well as different colored LEDs and they were circling all over the place And I thought wow that Elton John Got to have it Well that thing was big and dangerous Yeah. I mean, it spins around with big power, and it's like it's made for the ceiling where nobody can touch it. So we had to scale that down. But we found a couple of good boxes, you know, disco boxes with all those features, laser and diffraction gratings. That's how you see the printed stuff that says Elton John and Jersey Jack pinball. Those are all custom that we had made for us. And it's like that, the lasers, there's also strobe lights in there and that whole rotating color lens thing at the top. Yeah. That thing is awesome. It just puts out tons of color and always moving. It feels like it belongs there. So I wanted that and then I wanted two monitors because when I went to see him, when you go to see any rock show, they always have big monitors so you can see what's going on close up. And so I kind of want to reflect it on that. And Nick Jensen put it together. It's very nice. Love it. The great thing is I had asked Bill Grupp about the topper. He told me the exact same story about the Mexican restaurant. So there's there's there's nothing going on as far as fibbing or stretching or tall tales. Legitimately, that's where you came up with the topper. He was there. I mean, that's when it happened. I think Duncan was there, too. We were eating lunch. Duncan Brown, sure. And the thing went off, and we were like, oh, I had a habit. That's it. Now, speaking of Bill Grupp, who obviously was the lead on code on Elton John, this is your first time working with him on a game. You'd worked at the same company and had the office across from one another for a while. Yeah. But at Jersey Jack Pinball, I think Bill said the last time he had lead on a game was Congo. Talk to me a little bit about the process of kind of teaming up with Bill, having him take lead on your game and how that whole thing worked out? Working with Bill was great. We didn't have any arguments. I consider the trio of them, Joe Katz, Duncan Brown, and Bill, to be a super strong team. The team led by Bill just had great strength. I guess that's it. Everything I brought up, he always accepted, except if he couldn't do it. And I did the same for him. I mean, we all did that. We all wanted the game to be great and include everything, and it's like everything we could. Got to give Duncan Brown the credit, though. Yeah, for the light shows, right? Light shows, but that's not all. He's the guy that came up with making the screen go blank when the blind kid, those words, deaf, dumb, and blind kid came up. When the blind kid came up, the screen went black for a little bit, and he's got such supple wrists, and the flippers kind of flavor. So you're talking about during the song Pinball Wizard when you're playing, and you're in that song mode, so to speak. Right. We've actually gotten some customer service response from that saying, oh, I don't know. Is this working right? The flippers are fluttering. Yeah, is this thing working right? And we explained to them. It makes sense to everyone, I think. It's like it's a feature. It is a feature, no question. It doesn't refer you to a player. It happens in a fraction of a second, and it's over in probably three-tenths of a second. It's kind of a nice hit in an Easter egg. I was talking to Bill about Easter eggs. He's not really big on the Easter eggs, but they're still in that game, which I think is pretty fun. Yeah, it is fun. And then Joe Katz, it seems like his name pops up all over the place. Whether he's leading a game or not, he seems like he's instrumental in getting through a project and getting a game to completion. Joe Katz was great to work with, too. He's like a pinball fanatic. I feel like I have a great connection with him in terms of how a good shot feels and how rewarding it can be. Him aching me on somewhat. And I am aching him on it. But it's great magic between us as far as putting things together. And it's like I didn't just sit in my room and draw. I called all three of those guys, sometimes four, sometimes Chris Talko, the mechanical engineer, to come in and see what we're doing, look at a drawing and, you know, and play it and talk about it. You know, we do that very often. And, you know, they pointed out things I needed to respond to and I pointed out things they needed to respond to. There were no arguments. It was just like, yeah, that is what I need to do. Yeah, that is what we need to do. And I imagine, and you're kind of talking about this right now, it must be nice to have at your disposal people that are serious competitive pinball players that know how a shot should feel, how to get that kinetic satisfaction, pinball enthusiasts that work here, pinball collectors. Yeah, that's a very strong thing. I think it exists at every company. You always have some guys that can play much better. I'm not that guy. I am a guy who, I don't know, most quarters are dropped. Most games are played by people who are not expert players. So my job is to deliver the fun, to move the extra ball into a place where you might be able to collect it and continue your game. That's really important to me because I'm not going to get that far if I don't. If I play a game I'm working on repeatedly, I will learn it and get better than an average person because I've made the shots so many times. But for average, just walking up to a new game, I'm a loser with a big L on the forehead. So you've got to find your shots, find your way around that play field for sure. That's right. It's going to take me a while. When you're developing a game or you're designing a game, I mean, do you have kind of a step-by-step process that you go through as far as the general layout? Is it that you have a mech in mind that you want to build shots around? Is it you have a main shot in mind that you want to then kind of branch out? Or does that kind of fluctuate and change on how you approach making a Whitewood? No. In the beginning, I always make a document of the things I want to include. It's never the final document, though. I can add to it any time I want. I start with a nucleus of stuff, and how I'm going to put it together evolves. I don't know. I don't draw David Hankin drawings. I put the stuff on the play field, move it around until I think it's in a good spot and doesn't interfere with anything else. Pretty soon you have the beginning of a system where, you know, one shot leads to another, combos are possible, all that kind of stuff, target shots. You know, when you shoot at a target on my game, after it hits the target, it goes somewhere. I control that too. I always control those. I want them to, you know, within my ability to make a ball after it hits a target to go somewhere else, I will rotate that target until it does what I want it to do. and sometimes it just can't be done. Sure. But I just choose to make it the best it can be, you know, to play off other targets and other things. Are risky, dangerous shots something that happened as a matter of circumstance, or are you purposely looking to make a shot, a scary, potentially scary shot that could come back between your flippers? I don't try to do that, but, you know, when you stick a three bank in front of the flippers, Because now stuff's going to happen. But what you have to learn to do is shooting each of, say, that three bank. Yep. You know, it might not be healthy to shoot from the right flipper to the right target from that rebound. I can't make them all go back to the flipper. Right. So it's like. It would be boring if everything went back to the flipper. It would. So it's like, you know, I do the best I can, but I never intentionally want to drain the ball. That would be a very bad thing to do. The ball leaves the play field plenty of times already. and it's basically that's a function of how much drain space you have. Like I have a Captain Fantastic at home. Yep. That sucker's got acres of drain space. Yeah, for sure. A left drain, a right drain. The right drain's really miserable. You can't really play the post there off the wire form at the top. It has no bounce. And then you've got scissor flippers on the left side, another great big opening for the ball to leave the play field. And it's interesting that you bring up Captain Fantastic because if I remember correctly, the Captain Fantastic that you have was actually at one point artist Christopher Franchi's Captain Fantastic. Yeah, it was. Who did the art package on the Platinum Edition exterior cabinet and also did Playfield for the CE and the PE. Yeah. How was it working with Chris? It was great. In the beginning, the licensor said, don't put keyboard art all over the Playfield. Elton doesn't like it. And so we didn't. And, you know, John Yowsey also did the CE package at the same time, and both of them were instructed. Now, Franchi just ignored everything. Go figure that. I know. He brought in the artwork. Right. They loved it. They freaked out. Right. All of a sudden, keyboards could be on the play field. Everything Franchi did. And John Yowsey expanded his, too. You know, it was like. And you've worked with John Yousi over several titles art package-wise, correct? Yeah. I'm trying to remember what they are, though. We don't have to go through the titles. Not a full game. In other words, what I remember John Yousi doing was that beautiful LE back glass for Star Trek. Star Trek, right. Oh, I love that thing. It's just awesome. When it's lit from behind, it's just so cool. I respect him for a lot of other artwork, too. But that was what he did. Greg Ferreris did the play field. But that look, that whole look was so awesome. It was exactly what, you know, what the game needed. Definitely. How was it working with J.P. to win J.P. to win, you know, widely celebrated as an award winning animator. And he's the lead art director here at Jersey Jack Pinball. It's great. I just I had to get used to him making all the decisions and maybe, you know, push back a little bit on some things that I wanted to see in the game. But there weren't many, and we got used to each other, and the result is beautiful. So J.P. DeWin added a team member, and that was with Olaf Gremi. Olaf brought more of a three-dimensional element to the animations on this package, and talk a little bit about that. Yeah, he's magic. I mean, as far as creating characters and everything, great flowy style. I don't know, beautiful, sparkly stuff. Yeah, for sure. Just awesome. I definitely want them on my next team. Seeing some of the animations, for instance, and we were talking about Easter eggs earlier. When you start Rocketman multiball, you've got that rocket that's going through the animations. When you start Crocodile Rock, you see the crocodile. But in a unique circumstance, if you can stack the crocodile rock multiball with Rocketman multiball, what do you see? You see the crocodile riding on the rocket. I had nothing to do with that decision. I just looked at it and smiled when I saw it. It was incredible. It's like the right thing to do. Absolutely. And you use an interesting word, and that is smile. And I'm hearing a lot of people that are smiling when playing the game. And in my opinion, that's what pinball should make you do. It should make you happy. It should make you smile. Yeah, I think so, too. I like all different moods. I want you to be scared sometimes, you know, in some of my games. Not in Elton John, but in others. I want you to be, you know, getting ready to defend yourself, you know, getting ready to play, you know, harder than you usually do. Pay attention. you know, that the characters in the game can force you to do that or at least, you know, influence how you think about the game. The game's been out since October and there's been a lot of chatter about it. Anything behind the scenes that's of interest to people that maybe they didn't know or haven't picked up in a previous interview or discussion? Because you've been going to pinball shows, you've been promoting the game and obviously you've been sitting on panels. Jack Guarnieri's joined you and I think recently in Pentastic you had Bill Grupp out there, software lead, And then Mark Seiden, new designer at Jersey Jack Pinball. Who also helped me a great deal with Elton John in the beginning. He was like an apprentice, and I helped him as much as he could, but he helped me greatly. And Mark is given designer apprentice credit, I believe, on the play field too, correct? Yes, it is. There is, definitely. He was a great help. Well, I imagine that's going to be advantageous to him as he's getting ready to announce a game later this year. Sure. Well, I don't know about that. I haven't had much to do with his game because I'm busy as hell. there is one thing you know there's one thing that happened you know in the beginning i'm a glutton for punishment okay i go to pin side and read it okay inside hype thread started out with a bunch of negative stuff sure oh no i hope it's not elton john that was one category uh exactly what you're looking to hear right right and then it's Steve Ritchie, so I'll check it out. Okay, that's nice. The other one would be hard no. All these people and many of them I have met at shows and some of them said, I came in here to the show hating the game. I played it twice and I have to have it. That's happened a lot of times, not just to me, but at different shows. I've heard about it from the East Coast And, you know, just people in general, I'm glad they feel that way because it's not a good reason to reject a game. I mean, if you don't play a game and hear it and see it and feel it, you don't know what it's about. All the pictures in the world won't help you, you know, understand what a game feels like. I agree with you. What kind of presence it has. Like, wow, our sound system is awesome. It's just, I mean, to hear that, you know, to hear I'm still standing or heart lies bleeding. Those are such powerful songs, and it's like, man, the machine just reproduces them beautifully. And that is thanks to Bill Gropp's graphic equalizer and how he balanced the sound. Yes. Bill produced an incredible sound system, just made ours sound so good. And I don't know, it sounds great. It sounds better than any other pinball machine I've ever worked on. Well, and when you're at a pinball show, it's not always the easiest to get the full experience at a pinball show because it's so busy. There's a lot of sights and sounds happening, and audio usually lacks when you're trying to get that full experience. But with this particular game, you hear Elton John pretty loud and clear regardless of how busy the show is. Yeah, well, you're talking about somebody else, not me, because I'm half deaf. Yeah, okay. Okay, but yeah. Fair enough. I mean, people did say, wow, that sounds good. Texas Pinball Festival was so loud. It is. It was a great show, but I don't think they had any regulations on how much volume a game could make. Well, look, Steve, I appreciate that you took the time to kind of talk. I'd like to follow up with you again pretty soon and see the progress. I know we can't really talk about your next game. It's in the works, coming somewhere down the road. But congratulations on Elton John, and completely excited having you here, and can't wait to see what you do next. Ken, thanks a lot. You know, it's been great to work with you, too. I appreciate that. Feelings mutual. You're an enthusiastic guy, and you definitely are a huge piece of what people see and hear from Jersey Jack Pinball. It means a lot that you said it, Steve. Thanks so much, buddy. My pleasure. That's going to wrap up this episode of the Jersey Jack Pinball podcast. If you'd like to reach out to the show, you can reach us at podcast at JerseyJackPinball.com. And if you're not on the Jersey Jack Pinball email list, I encourage you to subscribe there. It's absolutely free. You'll get all the news and information that you need on a monthly basis with our new monthly newsletter called Quick Flips. I'm going to put a link in the show notes. You can click on that and you can register if you have not already done so. While you're subscribing to the newsletter, don't forget to follow us on social media. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, formerly known as Twitter, in the social media realm. And finally, if you're looking to start that career in pinball or looking to further your current career in pinball, go ahead and send us your resume. You can do so at careers at jerseyjackpinball.com. That's careers at jerseyjackpinball.com. And again, my apologies for sounding a little bit raspy as I fight through some seasonal allergies. I wanted to make sure I got this podcast out. But I do appreciate your patience and for your listenership along the way. I want to wish you all a great day, a great month, and whatever you do, Don't forget to take some time out of your day and play some pinball. So long, everybody.