Welcome to the Pinball Show interview series. I'm your host Matt Morrison and this is episode 7. Everyone has a dream theme list. Maybe you keep it in the back of your mind or in a Google Doc file or with your dealer on an interested list. Rush was at the top of my personal list for a music themed pinball machine. The best part of music pens is just that, the music. But balancing that with a fun layout, deep rules, lights, callouts, and sound effects is no easy task. But the team at Stern Pinball has done just that. I sat down with sound engineer Bob Baffey, who has taken on this near-impossible task. And we talk about his history in gaming, his role on Rush, and his work on previous Stern titles. So without further ado, Mr. Bob Baffey. Welcome to the Pinball Network's The Pinball Show interview series. I'm your host, Matt Morrison. And today on the show, we've got a great guest. His name is Bob Baffey. How are you doing today, Bob? I'm good. How are you doing? Very well. And just give everybody a quick overview of kind of where you've been and what you've done. Absolutely. So traditionally, I'm a video game composer and sound designer and sometimes programmer. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now. I started working on Game Boy Color that far back and some systems like Super Nintendo, PS1, 2, 3, 4, consoles, PC, all that kind of stuff, but mainly focusing on the video game side until I started working with Stern. Yeah, I was looking through kind of your resume and some of the stuff you'd worked on, and I was blown away having Game Boy Color and PS1 on there. What Super Nintendo stuff did you do? That was, I worked for a company called Digital Eclipse, and they did a lot of the early emulation stuff for companies like Midway and Konami. And so I think the Super Nintendo stuff I worked on were some of the collections. And it might have been even N64 that that really got a wide release on. But it was like Defender, Robotron, those kind of collections. And mainly for those, it was just making sure that the emulations played the sounds correctly, as well as maybe doing some music for the menus and that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's really cool. I do remember like a Midway compilation for the SNES. So that's really, really cool. I grew up, you know, in that era of those home consoles. So I'm very familiar with that. And obviously, you know, when you're talking about Konami or, you know, it goes back to the early Metal Gear games as well as the one on PS1 and a lot of great memories with just that. Speaking of emulation, I can remember playing like early PC emulators of like NES games and sometimes the sound would be off or, you know, things wouldn't line up. So I could see how porting those over to another system, you know, could have its problems. Yeah, it's a real challenge and they've gotten so much better now. And I'm actually still working with Digital Eclipse. They actually rebooted that brand and they're doing I would kind of they call them museum quality where they're working with publishers again, like Konami and Capcom, they're re-releasing these collections. They did a couple of years ago, I think it was the Capcom collection. They worked on a Street Fighter re-release. Yep. The 30th anniversary one. Yeah, I think I have that on Switch. Yeah. And that was really fun because you get to go through some of the history and luckily, some of these companies are opening up their archives to companies like Digital Eclipse. and I'm lucky enough when they have those things to get original music or notes from composers. Sometimes it's in Japanese, so we have to get it translated, and it's a little odd to follow certain things, but it's really fun, and they just pack that into these projects, which are just a labor of love, so it's fun to be a part of that. Yeah, that looks awesome. And I noticed when they re-released Mida Evil, the PS1 game, I always loved it, and I always felt like it didn't get enough credit, and they remastered it. What was it like porting that over? I mean, that's almost like a brand-new game, really. Yeah, that was fun. My role on that was a little bit different because we had the support of Sony, which was so great because I basically took advantage of their entire audio department. Wow. And my role on that game was we were using the Unreal Engine to port this and just rebuilding it from scratch. and so I was building a lot of the the music systems at least how they they played in the game and footstep systems and animation kind of things like that that Unreal didn't necessarily provide just kind of almost sitting back and and watching all the talented people uh at Sony I think it was Santa Monica studio was uh it was just amazing they they have like you know unlike my home studio They have a whole fully stage where they were doing specific zombie sounds for the game. And they went to Prague, I believe, and recorded orchestration. I couldn't make it, which I'm still kicking myself. It was right before COVID hit. And I was thinking, well, there'll be another opportunity for me to go out there. And my son had something going on. And I was like, well, I won't be able to go this time. And of course, now I haven't gotten another opportunity. But they recorded a full orchestra there. It was just amazing, the whole project. was great yeah and i think sony santa monica they're pretty famous for um i can't remember if it was the uncharted games they did some of the sound on or even maybe the god of war definitely god of war i knew it was one of the two and man what a what a sound package those games have i mean especially i remember the second one you know just being super epic so i'm sure that was an experience working with that team yeah getting uh and in fact i i did get to work with several of these guys who just jumped off of the latest God of War. So hearing their stories and some of their trips to go field recording are pretty amazing. Yeah, they kind of rebooted that series with the Norse mythology. And man, you know, reboots, a lot of times you're like, oh boy, they're just going to drag this thing out forever. But it was a phenomenal game. Really, really good reboot. Yeah, yeah, I love that one. So yeah, and then being able to work on that game with Sony, it's just like, you can have good and bad experiences with large companies that's obviously true in any kind of industry but that project was just so great and sony was uh fantastic that's really cool um well while we're on video games even though this isn't a video game podcast uh a lot of our listeners dabble in both uh what do you think about the you know microsoft acquiring activision and and god who knows how many other brands at the same time i'm you know i'm i'm optimistic on it a little bit concerned just because that kind of consolidation can be worrisome. I've been working on a Microsoft project and a project through an Activision company, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. I suspect that they'll be mostly hands-off at first and just kind of let things happen. But yeah, then after that, it's anybody's guess. I mean, there's good and bad things that can happen from that but like i said i'm just kind of optimistic that it might fix some of the things that activision was dealing with and my experience with microsoft is is you know they're a huge company and it's a lot of moving parts but they they generally treat uh their employees well at least in the the game division with the people i've talked to so right hopefully that pans out you know their commitment to that brand the xbox brand is especially i remember in the early days of Xbox Live, they were really pushing that. They were trying to get that market share. And they were, my brother was a huge, huge sports gamer and won a lot of tournaments and actually flew him to the All-Star game. And he played in front of like Dan Patrick for the like championship final. You know, it was almost like back in the day when Nintendo would do the world championships. It was really something. So yeah, it's super cool. And, you know, it amazes me that even though Sony kind of won, I guess, maybe what some people would consider the last console battle, but they're not giving up for sure, especially acquiring those. Blizzard was the other big one they got. Right. Really interesting stuff. It kind of came out of left field for me, but you may have had insight into that already. I knew nothing about it, and a lot of the people that I thought would know something about it knew nothing about it, so they did a very good job of keeping that mostly quiet. Wow. So that kind of leads us into one part of your resume. I saw, you know, there was some rock band games on there like Wii Ports and the PSP one. Have you always kind of started gravitating more towards the music based, whether it be pinball or software? Is that something that just kind of fell in your lap? It's an interesting story because that fell into our laps. That was at Backbone Entertainment. They were looking for a company that could... We had done some stuff on the PlayStation Portable. We'd done Death Junior. It was an original game that Konami published for us. And so we had a really good idea of the PSP hardware, audio, graphics, all of it. So Harmonix had approached us to see how we would do a handheld version because they didn't really think that they could do rock band on there with streaming multiple tracks of audio and some of the other technical limitations. We ended up getting it done, and I think we did a great job. It was something that was unlike what I had worked on there. I would say that was my first real music game. But the interesting part of this story is that one of the main engineers who worked with me to kind of build this handheld version of what they call the gem system of how they put the gems down on the lane was Tanya. No kidding. And so that might be a good lead into how I got hooked up with Stern. That's next on our itinerary, really. So how did you get the gig with Stern? Well, Tanya, I know, was talking about with Stern when he got there, expanding on their music and audio system. So traditionally, like now in video games, everything is really dynamic in terms of audio. There's a lot of middleware that allows you to create a game that's, I'll say, musically aware. That means that the game can know what the beats per minute of a song is. It can know where there's measure changes. It can know what beat it's on. It can even know the key and the pitch of certain tracks or melodies that are playing. And Tanya had the idea, as I understand it, I'm kind of speaking for him here, but to kind of bring some of that into the Stern system. And since we had worked on Unplugged, a rock band unplugged for PSP, he knew I had experience with these systems, creating these systems where you kind of make the game aware, musically aware. So he asked if I'd be interested on working on a system for that, and that coincided with working on KISS. Very cool. Yeah. And I think Tanya is a guitar player as well, maybe, if I remember correctly. Now going back to video games, just for a moment, there's a guitar learning game called Rocksmith. You know, you could plug a real guitar into your Xbox, and I always wondered how that system operated. Maybe it's similar in tracking the notes coming out of a guitar into an Xbox or a PS4 or whatever. Yeah, that was an Ubisoft title, I think. And the funny thing is I remember hearing about it, and then I never tried it out, so I never got to see exactly how it worked. Yeah, it's pretty neat. I would say if your guitar is not intonated very well, I'd seen some issues with that. But I mean, for the most part, it works very well and it's able to slow the track down and and help you learn that way. But I don't know if it was very if it sold very well. It always seemed like it was kind of on the back burner. You would you would see it on fire cells, you know, more often than not sometimes. But I thought it was it was a pretty neat piece of software. I love the idea of it. And the unfortunate thing is it just may have been a little bit too late in that in that whole, you know, game music kind of. I don't want to say bubble, but like Hill, you know, rock band and they were throwing so much money, both Guitar Hero, Harmonix. I mean, the amount of money that Harmonix had to spend on that Beatles rock band game was crazy. not to mention all the labels you know they if you think about back at that time but before it was before spotify before streaming really took off so the record companies and these labels were sitting on masters of all these these bands and really not making great money everybody's stealing music you know steedy sales are down and this game comes out where they're going to make a profit on licensing these masters and getting a profit every time they sell a copy of these songs on the rock band network so i think they ramped up just too much and then everybody got sick of you know storing plastic guitars and drum sets in the apartments and houses yeah yeah but man you're right it was almost maybe a bubble of some kind because that stuff was everywhere you know for a good bit and then you you would see it traded in and kind of hanging around second hand but as you were saying uh you came on board i guess in into kiss so so what did you do in the development of that game that was a uh a trial by fire i was working with lani and uh you know we were developing this system where i could take uh wave files and generate data that we needed to you know tell the machine when certain musical events happened but i was also learning the beginning the language of pinball and pinball sound. So I did do the sound package on there, but I had plenty of help from people to kind of push me along and nudge me in the right direction, thankfully, because I had a lot of experience by that point, but pinball was a whole new thing for me. Right. And I guess, how would you explain integrating that piece of software into Spike 2? Was that really difficult, being like a separate type of controller than maybe what you're used to on consoles or PC. It wasn't too bad, that experience with the Rock Band stuff. And of course, Tanya pretty much already knew what he wanted to do. And the first time I talked to him about this, we were already on the same page of it. It was just a matter of figuring out how we were going to do it and then writing the code for it. But that came together pretty quickly. And it's something that's still being developed and expanded on. For example, on Led Zeppelin, I think, and we could get this in detail later, but I believe Tim Sexton mentioned, talk he did, that we've kind of added pitch awareness a little bit to certain things where we play sound effects that are technically in key to the song you're playing. And there's a lot of cool stuff just incrementally coming online. And really, it's about budget, time. The tech stuff's already solved almost, except for making sure it all fits in terms of running the game, playing sound, playing video, and tracking all this stuff. Basically running that all at the same time. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. So with KISS, you're working with Lonnie and with some other people kind of chiming in here and there. Outside of integrating that software package and getting all that laid out,