Thank you for being a friend. It is time for another Pinball Profile. I'm your host, Jeff Teolis. You can find us on Facebook. We're also on Twitter at Pinball Profile. Email us who you'd like to hear, pinballprofile at gmail.com, and please subscribe on iTunes. He is Pinball's bully because he beats the hell out of every one of us. He is Keith Elwin, and he joins us right now. Hey, Keith, how are you? Good. How about yourself? I'm good. All right, you're not really a bully, but damn it, you're a very good player. And, you know, your life in pinball kind of reminds me of those thugs in Clockwork Orange. You know, you beat everyone up for years at pinball, destroy high scores and grand champions on machines. And now, like one of those clockwork goons who grew up and became a police officer protecting the laws they once broke, you are now making machines for us to make us pull out our hair until we master it. Well played, Keith. Well done. The guys that I beat up, I now became tournament directors. Since we last talked, you are now in Illinois working at Stern Pinball, and I think you've been there long enough now that you've passed the probation period, so let's tell everybody all the Stern secrets and upcoming games. Go now. Well, I'm putting the finishing touches on Golden Girls right now, and then I can start my next project. Golden Girls. Oh, I hope I can hardly wait. That'll be great. It's going to be beautiful. Nice pink powder coat. You're going to love it. Okay, so maybe not Golden Girls, but tell me this. Does Jack Danger at Deadflip offer to set up quote-unquote security at your home for you? No, he has not. All right. Can't get any information out of him either. I realize you're not allowed to tell anybody what you're working on. Fair enough. But maybe you can tell us exactly what you're doing at Stern. What's your title? I'm a game designer. I just sit in my chair and twirl around. I'll let my engineers do all the work. It's great. I love it. Your engineers do all the work, unlike when you did Archer, right? You've got someone else doing it for you. Oh, God, yes. I put in my views on that thing. No more. Okay, we don't know what you're working on, and that's fine. Fair enough, I respect that. Maybe, can you tell us a timeline, or at least a target date, of when we could see a Keith Elwin Stern product? No, I cannot, because it keeps jumping around, so... I don't even know at this point. You know, it kind of adds to the fun and mysterious aura. It's great, I love it. Well, I do know your Archer game that you made basically by yourself and your brother, that was two years, but now you have, like you say, engineers and an entire factory and a team behind you So it gotta be under two years wouldn it Well to be fair we never really finished Archer It pretty much no artwork bare bones code stuff inside a Congo cabinet So yeah, for two years work and on and off, it is what it is. All right, Keith, I'm not going to bug you because I do respect that you have to remain loyal to Stern. They do pay your paycheck after all. And who am I to spill secrets to for the two people listening to the show? But anyway, I do wonder when you got to Stern, did any of the other designers kind of give you the gears about blowing up any of their games? No, not really. They're all very nice, welcoming, and the software guys are constantly bugging me about score balancing and other issues. Steve Ritchie's always coming over. So, do you like Star Wars? Do you like it? Tell me the truth. Do you like it? You know, things like that. Well, Star Wars did just come out. I'm extremely excited. I absolutely love Steve Ritchie games. So, did they get you to test this while you were there? Did you get any feedback? Oh, yeah. I work with Dwight a lot on, like I said, mostly score balancing, things that I thought were ridiculous. Not really a whole lot of input in the game's rules, but scoring exploits. I pointed out a couple things. I gave him some tournament mode suggestions. So people aren't sitting there shooting the same shot over and over. So it should be, by the time it's done, it should be quite a good tournament game. Looks great already, and I'm excited to play it, as we just said. That is why so many of us are thrilled that you're working at Stern, because as the best player in the world, you're going to be able to tell these designers and the code makers and the programmers all of these possible exploits and we're going to see some great great games coming out of stern we already are but they're even going to be better now oh i hope so um i'm doing a rule set on my own game so i'm excited about that we'll see what i can do now i know your own collection is older games because you said before on pinball profile that you get bored of games where you can control them whereas on older games you can't control or master them so will your creation at stern be tough to master and control oh yeah he says that with an evil grin yeah you know the nice friendly feed every time i wouldn't expect that from my games but we'll see it might cave in certain areas uh-oh zip flippers are coming back yeah gobble holes are making a return okay maybe not well now that you're in the chicago area i have to ask you are you a giordano's pizza guy or a You know, I haven't had pizza since I've been here. What is wrong with you? I would have pizza every other meal and Garrett popcorn would be the other meal You know when I first moved out here I thought I be having Italian beef every day but I don So yeah you know That why you staying fit as a fiddle and a pinball champ and I just a chubby ginger from Canada All right, I got it. Pinberg is back, and it's time to defend again. I'm sure you're the favorite to win again, but even you'd have to admit it would be tough to go on a run like you did last year. Yeah, you know, I took first place on every EM in qualifying, which was amazing, I think. Maybe not the last round, but pretty much all the other rounds. Yeah, everything kind of came together last year. Probably not going to happen this year because I've hardly been playing pinball, so I'll probably be mere mortal. Mere mortal. Well, I'm hoping you give someone else a chance. I'm not worried, though, because I talked to Bowen, and we were able to get Algar in every bank you're playing. Awesome. Great. That's a killer classic there. I just praised that game. Yeah, I know it's one of your favorites for sure. It's going to be in the finals bank. Don't worry. That high hand and maybe Doodlebug again. Oh, I love high hand and Doodlebug, yeah. You don't get to many tournaments. In fact, semi-retired, as you've once said, it's just difficult with work and travel. So this must be a real treat for you to go to this. I know you unfortunately had to bow out of IFPA 14, but Pinburgh had to be something you're excited for a long time now. Yeah, this is the next to last tournament I'm attending this year, so it's definitely the biggest and it's my favorite, so I can't wait. Are you going to get at those sharp boys in Illinois for any of their kind of events? Who? Who are they? I don't know. No idea either. I know. I'm going to join their league next year so I can beat them up there too. Well, that'd be good. We've seen a few changes around this year to IFPA, the PAPA format change, and the new Stern Pro Circuit. What do you think of these changes? I don't think I've really been following. I don't know what interesting response I can give. What about the Stern Pro Circuit? You're an employee of Stern. Are you allowed to participate? I have no idea. I would assume so. You would assume so, but it's probably not something that's really on your radar, is it? No, no, not really. Semi-retired, my goodness. Pretty much give me a Pinberg Papa and I'm good. I'll do Expo just because I'm close. That's a good point, too, and that'll probably be part of the Stern Pro Circuit in the future, for sure. All right, well, then I'll be there. Are there any changes to competitive pinball that you would like to see, or is it really something that you're now just so far removed from? No, I don't know. I mean, I've been doing it for so long. it you know I started doing it in 1993 And all the changes so far have been pretty positive So I really don miss the games where you pay five bucks qualifying the same game all weekend to make the final and then they wheel out an EM mystery game for you to play one game on for the championship So those days are long removed, and I'm very happy about that. So, yeah, I have no complaints. Nothing bothers me more in a playoff than maybe a ladder format where it's a one game and you lose and you're done. I don't really find that the best way to do a competition. Yeah, I imagine doing that after you spend a weekend of qualifying, pumping money into it. All right, here's your one game. It's going to be on an electromechanical. You've never played before. Good luck. Yeah, the tournament format has definitely changed for the better since I first started. The other thing I've noticed, too, in the odd tournaments, and I know you probably don't get out to many of them, where they say we're going to play a mystery number of rounds before we get to the playoffs. Maybe it's a time frame. So we'll do three, four hours, and then we do playoffs. I would much rather hear we're having X amount of rounds no matter what the time is. So you kind of know where you are in the middle of the tournament as opposed to watching the clock the whole time and someone's blowing up a game or a game's gone down and you're waiting and maybe you need a couple more games to get in there. And now that's not a possibility because there was no finite number of rounds. Biggest pet peeve for me is that. You know, guys are out there creating a lane of ball, 30-second killing time. That's not a good moment. Well, whether it's on purpose or not, it's just you want to have some sort of game plan. or at least, okay, yeah, I tanked this game, but I've still got two more games. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The unknown does not make for good strategizing, especially the formats where you can only choose the same game once per round or per tournament in some cases, so you really got to strategically pick when you pick the game and who you're playing against. So, yeah, you kind of remove all that and you don't know how many rounds you're playing. Keith, all kidding aside, I know you're busy, semi-retired, but we do love seeing you at events and tournaments and we really look forward to what is coming from you. from Stern Pinball. Well, thank you very much. I hope everybody enjoys what I do, and we all win. We will see you and your Golden Girls game soon, but see you at Pinbird. All right. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find us on our group on Facebook, also on Twitter at Pinball Profile. Email us pinballprofile at gmail.com, and please subscribe on iTunes. I'm Jeff Teolas.