Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory revealed at Flip Expo. Special bonus podcast interview with Jack Guarnieri. Hello and welcome to this special bonus podcast from the Flip Expo show in Le Trepot in France. I'm Martin Eyre from Pinball News. And I'm Jonathan Houston from Pinball Magazine. And we've taken this opportunity, as we did last year, to have a special interview with Jack Maneri of Jersey Jet Pinball, although there's a special reason for doing it this year, rather than just out of interest in the way the company is going, because this is the show where they are launching their newest game to the European market. And that game is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which was shown to everybody today at around about midday. Right. And interestingly, as many of you might be aware, the game was also revealed last night at Midwest Gaming Classic. So that was just a couple of hours before the European reveal. But it's, well, we were talking to Jack and he's been in the amusement, the coin-op amusement industry for 44 years. And he can't remember any pinball machine ever being, debuting or revealing in France, which is very odd since France is a very big territory for pinball traditionally. Yeah, had a long history with Gottlieb. Right. So, well, there's a first for everything, and this game basically has a dual continent release, or reveal, as you might call it, being in the States and Europe as well. And the game is set up here in the booth of Dave Christensen Lienar, the importer for Luxembourg, and along with a Yellow Brick Road edition of The Wizard of Oz, Dialed In, Pirates of the Caribbean, and a Hobbit game. So the entire... All five titles. All five titles are present here. And once the game was rolled into the room around noon, after Jack gave it a software update, basically there's been a line of people waiting to play it. Yes, and it was streamed live as well on the internet. And I think I was one of the fortunate first four to get to play it. And personally, I'm very impressed both with the presentation and the way that it shoots. we do talk about that more in the interview with Jack so I won't go into it too much here but Jonathan you've also played it what were your impressions? well at that time I wasn't really playing the best games that I probably could I did notice that this game could use a little stronger flippers, I think they turned them down on purpose they do tend to do that at shows particularly when they launch it it could also be that there is just not enough electrical power for all these games and that all games have weaker uh flippers but uh either way um the flippers could be a little snappier but other than that i think it's a great flowing game uh very colorful and in terms of team integration i think they really knocked it out of the park on this one so uh congratulations to pat lawler and his team yes absolutely um so we won't spend any more time introducing the interview because Jack certainly has plenty to tell you about the game and the processes that went into making it and the licensing as well. So let's not waste any more time. Let's go straight over to Jack, who's going to talk to us about the unveiling of his brand new game, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. So welcome, Mr. Jack Guarnieri. Thank you. Should I say Willy Wonka? Thank you. Yes, so you're here at the Flip Expo show, along with us, for the European unveiling of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Yeah, pretty cool. I was reminded that apparently, I guess, nobody has ever launched a brand new pinball machine in France before, which is kind of strange. Especially considering how big of a market France is. Exactly right, exactly. A couple of people reminded me of that this morning, so it was pretty cool to be here and have Willy Wonka. Well, the timing was serendipitous, I should say, before we had too much of this lovely champagne that we've been provided by the organisers of this show. So, if at any point you start thinking like, this is becoming a really weird interview, we'll blame it on the champagne. Okay, we'll see. Right, so let's go back to the very start then. How did you get the Willy Wonka license, and when was that? Oh, I probably started working on that in 2011, really. When you just founded the company. Yeah, around the time I had Wizard of Oz, I actually asked my rep, Warner Brothers, kind of jokingly, everybody asked them, what's like the Wizard of Oz? And they don't have a license like Wizard of Oz. And the nearest thing that we could think of was Willy Wonka. And there was a problem. They didn't have the rights to most of the actors because when they did the movie in 1971, they really didn't secure rights thinking about what they were licensing for the future. So it took them a few years. It wasn't until probably 2014 or 15, 16 when I got back to them and it was going to be something that could possibly happen. Right, so what was it about Willy Wonka that appealed to you? Is it everything that The Wizard of Oz also gave? Well, you know, you have little people, you have Oompa Loompas and Munchkins, so you have that. But you really have, you still have a good and evil kind of thing going on. And Willy Wonka, for me, it was always being honest. Honesty and being a good person kind of won the reward at the end, where Charlie gets to live happily ever after with his family. That's what everybody is believing. Can you imagine, like, this is a, how old is Charlie? Eight years old? Right. Inheriting a factory. That's like a nightmare. Well, if it's a pinball factory, it might be, but a chocolate factory... Imagine having a chocolate factory, having to worry about all the delivery... It's not to worry about, all the Yumpa Lumpus they carry... Don't they need a manager? It didn't seem like Willy Wonka was much of a manager. He was having a good time, Willy Wonka. He probably learned how to source out stuff, but Charlie had no clue. Well, at the end of the movie, he asked Charlie, you know what happened to the man who wished he had everything? And he said, what? And he said, he lived happily ever after. So it's always a nice story. You know, the song in the movie, Pure Imagination, for me, is really like Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It's in many ways the same song, the same thought, the same dreams and hopes. and Charlie was just a good kid that at the very end was very pure and he didn't want to sell out to Slugworth even though Grandpa Joe kind of was a little mad at Willy Wonka in one of those last scenes there when he got yelled at you get nothing, good day, all that kind of stuff he lifted fizzing lifting drinks and all of that and Charlie said, you know what, I don't really need this guy is everlasting gobstop, I'll just give it back to him. I'm not going to do anything. And that's what one, that's what, what I was looking for, a pure heart and somebody who was honest. Somebody that wouldn't think like an adult with a lot of different thoughts of doing not so good things. So, let me pose a question then because you, You've got the license, or you've got access to the license, and you've got Pat Lawler, who designed the game. How were those two brought together? Did you ask Pat to design a Willy Wonka game, or did Pat say, I want to design a game, and what have you got available? And he immediately picked Willy Wonka, or what was the process of teaming those two together? Everybody knows Pat said that he likes to do primary colors, and he likes to do cute things, and he likes to build toys. so what better theme for Pat to work on than Willy Wonka but did he pick it or did you ask him to design it we asked him and then he picked it so really that's how it goes it's been said before you really need to have people that have a passion for the license if you shove down somebody's throat like anything in life you're not going to get a good result They have to want to do it and have a passion for it and get behind it and have the whole team be that way and dedicate part of their life, you know, more than a year to just, you know, designing and engineering a game. Right. So, now I might be privy to some information that not everybody is privy to, but as far as I understood it, Pat initially was working on a different game, which got delayed because of a licensure basically delaying the whole process. And then he had to start working on this game, which I believe he did in less than a year. It was a pretty quick development cycle. I don't know exactly if it was less than a year or a little bit more than a year, but it was a pretty aggressive schedule that the team kept to. We knew we wanted to show that game in the springtime of this year. Right. And obviously, Pat is not working alone, but if I may say so, I think I was able to have a look under the playfield. Since award shows is apparently now a thing in pinball as well, I think there really should be an award for mechanical engineering. Because I looked under the playfield and that rotating mechanism that opens up where the ball falls into. Right. that was sort of impressive I was impressed by them I'm glad you like that normally beauty skin deep but our beauty what we do goes beyond the play field it goes under the play field into the backbox pretty much in everything we do we try to really engineer things to last and to work and to be serviceable so I'm glad that you picked up on that I appreciate that. Right. So, and what many people not may realize, if you look at the pictures of the playfield, it's actually a three-ramp game. Right, right. Because there's a third ramp, a center ramp, which is sort of hidden by the white camera. Right. For the one coefficient. Right. But that makes me, made it even more impressive to me. Yeah. How much shots are crammed into this game. Oh, yeah. And, you know, for me playing it, the upper right with the upper right flipper is kind of like another whole upper play field, even though it's on the same level. Because if I don't make the shot that I want, that ball might come back and I get another chance and another chance to make that. And it's kind of reminiscent of a contained upper play field for me, anyway, the way I play. And I think it was pretty cool. Other people have noticed that, too. So there's a lot of game there. I mean, we pack a lot of stuff in the game. We're really proud right now that the LE game has all the things it has. The CE game has all the things it has. And the SE game is $7,500. Right. So we reduced that price by $1,000. We really want to get more games on location and try to make that happen. Right. So this is the first time that all three models basically have different, not only different art packages, but also different playfields, where on the standard, less features are featured on the play field, so to speak. Right. Well, we're trying that model, and we want to be able to offer some more choices to the customers, what they're asking for. And that's a response to that. and certainly having the game be $1,000 less in price, it should open it up to a lot of other people that price is a barrier, and then when they see how much it earns on location, they buy a lot more of our games. Right. So you normally are based in Lakewood, New Jersey, if you're not traveling the rest of the world for pinball shows and that stuff. The design team is mostly based in Bensonville, Illinois. Obviously, we have Jean-Paul Levin here in the Netherlands. Well, he's not here in the Netherlands, but in the Netherlands. Well, you always feel like you're in the Netherlands, even though you're in France, right? Right, yeah, well... You're closer to the Netherlands than you would be. Yeah, true. So that makes me wonder, obviously the design team is going to develop the game, but how involved were you or kept up to date on the progress of how the game was being developed? I was involved and I was involved in a number of decisions. The team really needs to be led by the designer and the designer is Pat. And Pat is a great leader and a good manager and he had a vision and the team had the vision with him and they all collaborated to make the game. With this license, I was very involved with the submission and the approval process. Warner Brothers, that's not a secret, Warner Brothers was merged with AT&T recently. Some people in the company changed, some people left, some people came in. people's jobs were realigned and so like any company that happens it's great that I have different relationships all over the company so that when we needed something that needed a little extra push I could get in touch with somebody and make it happen so the submissions are you know I get to see them and get to comment on them and push them along and being that be in that process and it was a lot of fun. I mean, things have to happen when you need them to happen. You can't just, I mean, a company like Warner Brothers probably has more than a thousand submissions from other licensees going on with all kinds of other titles. And we always look at it, you know, we're, you know, we want what we want and we need what we need. So we have a great partnering with Warner Brothers with our products. They love our games and this is the third license we've done with them. It's nice to be part of their family, their extended family and we have great relationships with them. And when you're dealing with a license like a movie that's that old, very much in the way with The Wizard of Oz, you're in a position where you can get new assets from that movie. You can't get new video clips, you can't get any of the actors directly to do voice calls. So how much material did you get compared to a movie like The Hobbit, where obviously there's three movies worth there. There's a lot of clips, there's a lot of speech, and a lot of music as well, which you might be able to tap into. But when dealing with Wonka, what you've got is what you've got. Well, we got more than we could probably use, really. I mean, we have speech from the movie, sound from the movie, scenes from the movie, and that's what I always dream about. Our games are very asset-rich, not just in sound and music that we license. I license four songs for the movie. And I think we have a package that is really amazing. The game inside is probably coded, you know, Joe Katz might say, a better number than me because he's the guy doing it, I would say it's about 60%. It's going to ship 1.0. It's going to ship complete when we ship it. And things all come together, you know, as you see things develop. And it's pretty far along right now. You can really tell how it's going to come out. And we're really proud of it. We're really happy with it. And you had voice actors in there as well doing people-related call outs. Yeah, we have like a narrator. You do. that does pinball speech, as it were. And then there's a lot of speech from the movie that lends itself, which is very, I don't want to say caustic, but it's Willy Wonka-esque. It's those things he said, you know, the good day, sir, and the about to come back again, all those kind of things, that lend themselves to pinball, you know, if you lose your ball or you tilt the game, things like that, which are very cool. So I always like, I'm more of a player and somebody when I try to teach people how to play pinball, I'm extremely vague. I always say to people, well, just shoot the flashing lights. I don't want to show them everything and teach them everything. I don't want to go play the game with my fingers to go show them all the features and all the rules. I love people discovering it and watch their face and see the animation, see the use of the camera in the game and hear the different speech calls. and that why I had Frank Bona play the game first here and you Martin because I wanted really good pinball players to play the game on the feed earlier so that they could get into the game And not even knowing the game you know I look back at Frank and two or three minutes later he was still playing the game Because intuitively as a pinball player, we want the game to be easy to understand. We don't want to have a gigantic rule book how to play the game. We want it to be approachable for the casual player and yet something that you really can't master. So easy to understand and hard to master. There are quite a lot of innovative features in that game. Things that we've never seen in pinball before. In particular, the sheer number of magnets used. Seven magnets, I believe, in that game. Used in a different way with LEDs on top. Do you want to talk us through some of the things which are new in this game? Well, I think, you know, just the simple thing of having four flippers on the game where they are and where Pat and the team have them and all the shots, all the different, how you can stack a lot of different things. It's been done before, but the Wonka Vader having the balls that, you know, are on the Wonka Vader, you know, so that they can be used in multiball. the camera and how you're inserted in WonkaVision with the effect of that. I think in a lot of ways the game, you said it, I think you said it best. It looked like a candy store when you first looked at it, right? With all the colors and all the lights and it looked like a little bit of a candy store, a little bit of an amusement park kind of thing. It's what you would quote-unquote expect Willy Wonka to look like. It's a beautiful game And I think not only for home customers, which we treasure, but on location, that game should print money. I mean, the operator in me says, give me your money and take my money. This is a great game, theme-wise and play-wise. and as a player one of the players who played it for the first time it certainly seemed that you could very easily get into the everlasting multiball feature and that's something which I don't think we've seen before is that rotating disc on there as well I think it's amazing how many shots are actually packed into that game. You said it's like there's an upper play field, but I think it's unique in the way the pack designs his games. Although he's packed in a lot of shots, other games are packed in a lot of shots, but they all seem to flow very nicely on this one. None of them seem like they're forced in there and unnatural shots to be making. I think all of us that play pinball, we don't want to just hit rubber posts. We want the ball to go somewhere, I want it to hit something, I want it to score and I want it to reward me with something. And you don't want a brick fest, and you don't want something where you're playing in ramps to reject shots and things like that, or you have to put in really strong flippers to accommodate for poor geometry. So when you play one of Pat's games, you have a feeling that you're back home again, that you played something that you really know. It's like laying on a couch that you always took a nap on, let's say. It's just like that old pair of jeans that you put on that really feels comfortable. I mean, playing one of his games gives all the players that feeling. It just feels very familiar, but yet fresh at the same time. Now, I seem to remember way back when we first started talking to you about the Wizard of Oz, you said at the time that you don't want to be that company that takes things out of the game in order to produce other versions, and yet that's apparently what you're doing with this one as well. Well, I've also said never say never. You know, the team had the idea to take out that mechanism. I can tell you it wasn't... It was not received well by me in the very beginning until I actually think about it a little bit and understand it a little bit more. And the benefit is also being able to sell the game at a more competitive price. I mean, that feature is still simulated in the game. It still recognizes that you would have locked balls up in a Wonka Vader. Right, that's kind of virtual. Right, right, right. So we lose with a lot of different products. Sometimes the manufacturer loses sight of the fact that a certain amount of money this way or that way makes a difference of selling the product to that market or not. And I think part of what we want to do, I know what we want to do, is that we want to be more competitive in the marketplace, especially for operators. And being an operator, you know, I've always said, selling your equipment, it doesn't matter what the game costs, it matters what the game makes. But to get the game in the door, if it's $7,500 or $8,500, this game, you're not going to get a competing product in the marketplace for $7,500 that's going to compete with this game. This game will blow away anything in that price range. Anything anybody else builds. It'll blow it away. I'll guarantee that on location it will make more money, it will be more reliable, it will have a better resale value years from now than anything I see in the market and that's me talking as an operator. We need to look at the marketplace and the marketplace changes. And a few years ago, Wizard of Oz and all the other games were aimed straight at the home. And, you know, it's true that today there are a lot of barcades and places that are commercial where these guys are putting CE games in location. You know, a place like Sunshine Laundromat and Barcade, literal Barcade, the real Barcade and places like that. They're putting in the highest end games like Ant's down in Louisville at Zanzibar. Those kind of places, they go for the CE games. They want the highest end. and they have, you know, Adams Family Golds and every kind of high-end game. But that's not the case with Joe Operator. Joe Operator just wants, you know, a game that he could afford to put in there and be what it used to be years ago, just a piece of equipment to make money for the location and for him. And do you think that a limited edition run of 5,000 is a limited edition run? or is that just a name of the middle machine in the range? Yeah. You know, limited edition, I joked at pinballsales.com, the only thing that was unlimited was aggravation. I guess everything is limited at some point, whether it's $2,000, $3,000, $5,000. I think we need to give our buyers some expectations of what it is. I said this years ago Adams family you had 22,000 games built you're hard pressed to find a good Adams family that you can buy right now for your home wow thank you look at this we've got some crepes delivered to us thank you very much catering is top notch here at the Expo it is I'm going to guess there's Nutella in there yes I would be disappointed if it wasn't but But, you know, I think part of that is with a game like Addams Family where you had 22,000, you would say, gee, that game's all over the place. But you can't find one anywhere right now in any decent shape to buy. So they all found their places. Some got destroyed, maybe not many. Some found the final resting place. So even if we were lucky and fortunate enough to build 5,000 L.E. Willy Wonka games, It's not that much for the whole world. It's not. Obviously, that depends on how the game is received and marketed to both operators and collectors as well. Obviously, the collectors are probably very aware that this game was coming, or at least they had a... Probably the worst kept secret that there could be. No, there's another company that has a trademark on keeping WarScap secrets. Okay. But the expectation that this was the game that people, that was going to be revealed, okay, so that was no secret even though you, until the last minute... I was calling a JJP5. Exactly. In front of you, who signed an NDA and I was still calling a JJP5. Right. I didn't break. Neither did I. So that's a good thing. Congratulations. And so in terms of marketing, do you have any special strategies in order to basically tell operators like we got a new game and this is going to be a moneymaker for you? Because that's basically what games are supposed to be. You know, the cool thing is that I kind of have two different lives, maybe more than two, but let's talk about the pinball industry and the amusement business. So, you know, you see me at commercial trade shows, and I enjoy all those relationships to the commercial trade shows that are not, you know, a pinball show, per se, as we're at today. Where I got my nickname, Jersey Jack, from certainly is Replay Magazine, who I write for. I don't shamelessly plug our product in every issue, but we do advertise in there. And they have an operator poll. Now, the operator poll, unfortunately, it works based on how many of the games are out in the wild. A lot of our games are not out in the wild, and we don't really poll very well in that magazine. But the games we do have earn very well. so our best network of the people that operate our games and have them communicate with other operators and potential operators and spread the word I mean I got a call from a major amusement chain that's a public company interested in buying double digit Willy Wonka games they want to try four or five and if they work, which we know we do and they make money, which we know they do, they're going to make a commitment for a lot more. Companies like that that do those kind of things, once other companies see those kind of companies do that, they jump and pull too. And that's what we really have to do. You have to break through some of the bigger chains and you have to, you know, every game that you sell matters, especially commercially, because that's where most of the home customers get to see the games, to buy them in the home. They go out in commercial locations to see them. Not all of them are in pinball clubs or in tournaments or leagues that they play in every week at your house or Martin's house somewhere, and they get to play a game and they decide to buy it. So it is important for us to get games out on location, and never a bad time to buy a good game. I was saying the other day we were talking about the landscape of pinball and people asking me, so many companies making pinball machines, There's all these games. You know, is the market going to crash? In typical Jack fashion, I said, there's a lot of games. There's just not a lot of good games. Okay? And that's what we built. We built great games. We built games that people don't want to sell. And when they do, they have a really high resale value. And we don't need to get our customers to sign an agreement saying they won't sell it for 18 months or anything. I can tell you they love their games. They don't want to sell it for 1,800 years. So keep them forever. Now, each time we've interviewed you in the past, we always come up with the same basic point, which is that with each new model that comes out, you always want to get closer and closer to being in the position where you can show it and then be able to sell it straight away. Now, you're getting closer, and I think with the Yellow Brick Road edition of Wizard of Oz, you were almost at that point. where are you in relation to that with Willy Wonka when's it going to be available for people to actually buy you know Yellow Brick Road we probably shipped about 50 of them or 60 of them already so it was great with the reveal we showed Games on the Line and whether people wanted a Yellow Brick Road at that moment or not they were actually thrilled to see Games on the Line as we're sitting here eating this delicious crepe. That sounds like a really weird combination of words. Delicious crepe. Crepe to zip. Crepe, crepe. Sorry about that. You know, our main line is being changed over to do Willy Wonka. All right. Parts are coming in. So that means you stopped making Wizard of Oz's or are they on a different line? Wizard of Oz is on a small line. Right, okay. So, yeah, we're getting about eight or nine, ten Wizard of Oz games off the line every day. So that's going well. You said you're going to make like 200 this year. 200 games, yeah. So that's not going to take very long to get those done in a day. Right, exactly right. In fact, most of them are sold. I don't know the exact number, you know, but it was very, very well bought. a lot of people didn't know what the game was until they really saw the game how beautiful it is and Dave Christensen has some here at the show so that's really great so what's your what's delaying your production at the moment I don't know I don't like the D word that's not a good word we're actually on time I would say that you know things have to come in we have to verify the parts coming in are good which so far everything's good and then we have to put things on the line train staff, build sub-assemblies and populate the line and pop games off the line bring them into final test and rinse and repeat, just keep doing that I would say early summer to me, if it's a little sooner great, we're a hero I don't see it being any later we're looking good right now Grab me at the next show and ask me the same question. I'll let you know. We're being honest about it. It's certainly not something where we have a game today and we're going to be looking at each other at Pinball Expo and somebody's going to be saying, you know, you didn't ship any Willy Wonka games yet. Those days are behind us. And now you're in the position to start production. And yeah, your idea is not right because you haven't actually specified when you were going to produce them, so you're not missing any deadlines. It's a self-imposed one. But how long is the license? How long can you keep making these games without having to renew the license, I should say, really? I know at Texas you said you've renewed Wizard of Oz, you've renewed Pirates as well, even though you actually have no plans to reproduce or produce any more Pirates. Well, again, with these licenses, they go for several years. From the moment where you sign on the line or the moment you start producing them? No, it's typically the moment you sign on the line. Right. But I try to build in enough time where it includes development time and then selling time and then sell-off time in the event you don't want to renew it. Mm-hmm. So far, everything we've built as a company, now we're up to game number five, unbelievably, but we have the license right now to build all five of those games for the foreseeable future. So could we go back and build Pirates in a year from now? We could, but I probably wouldn't go back to Disney and say, let's make a Black Pearl edition, because it's too much to go back through all the approval process again. Yeah. I don't want to jump back into that. We have a lot of other things we're working on right now. If it was the only thing we were ever going to do, and I thought it would have a value to do it, maybe, but not everything works that way. Never say never. Never say never, but in that one I'm going to tell you, it's probably not going to happen because I'm not going to go back. I can still understand that. Yeah, I mean, Pirates is a great game. People wanted more. You know, we were talking just five minutes ago in London in January when I said to you guys, you know, all the games are sold out. And it was true. They were all sold out then. We were still building some, and maybe some of our distributors have them. But, you know, we were sold out. it's just it's just a question of trying to gauge what you're building in the future with what you're building now and demand and how many you want to build but so far we don't have a problem with building anything that nobody wants to buy right hold on oh is that you I'm not sure but oh it could be you not you Jack it's not your phone ringing oh my phone is ringing It's Gary Oh no Gary Stern called his time He must know who we're talking to Maybe he has his ears bugging No it's not Gary Stern It's Gary Flower Hello Gary Flower Well you're very familiar with Gary Gary Flower Gary I stopped at Gary's house Gary had me at a house guest Gary is actually currently At the Midlife Gaming Classic where the game did unit last night as well. Yeah. And he's supposed to be phoning in his report to us. Yeah, true. If you don mind let switch to Gary Cloud Gary Hi Gary Can you come in Hello Gary Hello is there anybody there Hello Hello Gary can you come in Hello Gary Hello is there anybody there Hello Hello Gary Jonathan can you hear me Gary? Jonathan, speak, I can't hear. Gary, Gary Flower, it's Gary Flower calling you, Gary. Can you hear me? Sorry, I can't hear you. Oh, oh, you see how the call is going. It appears we have like a... Can you speak, Carl? A weird connection, I can hear some noise, but I don't hear any voice. He can't hear you Yeah, he can't hear us I'm going to hang up Okay, well we'll come back to that Right A little bit later if we can So, sorry about that interruption Don't worry about it Yeah, well So, perhaps you can tell us, Jack About how the launch went over In the Midwest Gaming Classic last night Perhaps you've got some information From your team there About the unveiling of Willy Wonka Because I imagine it was a bit different What time was it here when they were doing the unveiling? It was about 2 o'clock in the morning. 2 o'clock at 2 a.m., yes. Right, so I was up, I was watching it. Mm-hmm. I thought it was great. I wasn't there. You wish you were. No, I don't say that. Just from the... You know, I could only be in one place at a time. I knew what was going on, obviously. I had made a choice to be here some time ago. I had no anxiety about changing that. I'm happy to be here, and I'm happy the team did everything they did at the show. They didn't need me there. The game was there, and that's what matters. So it was a lot of fun for them, and I think today, here at our launch, it was great for all the people so far that saw it. Right. Right. So, just a minute ago, you talked about the licensing process, renewing licensing and so on. As we know, the licensing approval process can be a real pain if you're building a pinball machine. Obviously, you established a relationship with Warner Brothers. I like how you say that. Warner Brothers. I like that. Okay. So my question is, were there any big hurdles to take in regards to getting approval for certain ideas or concepts for this game? Yeah, I would say no. It was very cooperative. They were very understanding. There's a great team there because we have history with them of the games we make. And at their offices, they have, you know, they have a Hobbit game. that was it of us. They know what we do, and they get it. So a lot of the approvals, a lot of submissions, I mean, there's hundreds of submissions we make for different things, and sometimes they come back to us and they say, you can use this a certain way, you can't use this this way, you can use it that way. I don't think I'm really telling anything that many people don't know. I mean, with Willy Wonka, it's a little different in a way because it's not just the submission of things to Warner Brothers per se. You have two different estates that you're dealing with, the Donald estate, the Ronald Donald estate that wrote the book, and you have Gene Wilder's estate. And these estates, they have different approval rights to different things, likenesses, images, uses, and a whole litany of other things. So you could have Warner Brothers approve something. You could have the dollar state approve something. You could have Gene Wilder's state say no. I'm not saying it happened that way. But so when you have multiple choice and variations of different things and you have to submit and resubmit and change things and do that, it's more work. It takes more time. Sometimes, and not necessarily with Willy Wonka, but sometimes you can use something from a style guide that may be disapproved because the people that created the style guide, there's no continuity with those people anymore. In legal or approval or something changed in the atmosphere or in the psyche of how the theme is looked at now, and somebody could say something to you. We didn't have much of that with Willy Wonka. It was great, and it was a dream theme for me. It was a movie I saw as a kid in the movie theater in 1971. My kids have watched it a million times. I just watched it again the other day. It was on TV as I was flipping around. I watched it again. It's like one of those movies that just makes you feel good. It makes me feel good anyway. Well, I'm sure that you're hoping that seeing the success of The Wizard of Oz, which you apparently keep on making, that Willy Wonka is going to be your next Wizard of Oz. I think it could be because it's what they say in our industry. It's an evergreen title. You know, it's a game that really transcends gender, age groups. If it's fun, which it is. I know it's fun. You guys played it. That means a lot. You could have games that are... There's probably a very delicate balance of ingredients that need to go into a pinball machine to make them be a success. It's a combination of how the game plays, certainly, but it's also satisfying shots. It's understandable rules, rewards. You want to really feel good when you achieve something on a pinball machine. You want to have the sensory overload that our games give you, the sound, the speech calls, the lighting effects, all those things. they really have to come together in a delicate balance to make a really great game, and that's what we strive for. And how much do you think your games need to be family-friendly, and maybe does that lead to them being less combative in terms of the way the game is presented to the player? It's not you're battling straight away, it's you're trying to achieve something in cooperation. Right. I think those kind of games are good. I love all kinds of pinball machines, even ones that we don't build or we never built for many years ago. I certainly love ours more. The place where we are is a family-friendly kind of thing, but it doesn't mean that we wouldn't make something in the future, not that's less family friendly but that may have a little bit more of an edge to it or a little bit more of an adult option to it at some point or other but they would still be something where games today if they go in a home and they sit in your living room and you have company over you may not want the graphics to certain games be something that you show your neighbors or the people that you work with that kind of thing. Because you wouldn't put any sort of blood or gore into your games. I don't see it. I don't see it. You know, I don't see it. Years ago, I've said it on other podcasts and things like that. PinballSales.com, we kind of shied away from selling certain games that didn't appeal to the whole family. It wasn't that important to sell a certain title where I couldn't believe in the title or it offended a certain group of people. We just didn't sell them. Well, speaking of offending a lot of people, how about those Ompalumpas? Aren't they cool? But aren't they offended? I don't know. I haven't seen one lately. Have you? I mean, we do have a guy in America with an orange face. You're not your own. We have a guy in America with an orange face, but he's a little bit taller than those Ompalumpas. He outgrew the Ompalumpa status, I guess. Right. I think he got out of that side stage, but I think they're pretty cool. You know, Willy Wonka, to some people it was a scary kind of movie because the kids disappeared a little bit sometimes. You didn't know, you hoped for the best that what happened to them when Violet had to go get all the juice squeezed out of her. You wondered kind of like what happened when you were a kid or whether or not Willy Wonka had the incinerator running that day. It was an odd and even day and, you know, it worked out. And Mike TV, I don't know if they ever stretched him and made him big enough again and he was back to normal. It kind of gave you pause, especially as a kid, if you should really be bad. I think maybe that's what they were trying to go for. Like, you know, maybe if I'm bad, I'm going to get into some kind of trouble that I'm not going to be able to get out of. I don't know. So where do you go from here then? You launched the game in Europe, launched the game in the U.S. Are you doing any more launches or is it full steam ahead of getting the game production? It's full steam ahead, but we do have games that will go out on location. We have games that will go to shows, you know, the show schedule. My life lives by what's on your website, all the shows, and I have to go book all my travel plans by what's going on, you know, on Pinball News. So yeah, there'll be a lot of travel. I'll be over a hundred and something thousand miles this year happily. A lot of distributor open houses, a lot of location launch parties. Maybe I can't make all of them, but the games will be there. And a lot of fun. I could see a really fun summer of a lot of Willy Wonka games. I could hear the tune in my head as I'm laying on a pillow for my three hours sleep every night. I've got to admit that the music in that game and the music from that movie, that's an earworm you'll be stuck with that for the rest of the summer yeah I don't think I'm stuck with it you know when you like something let's talk in August and see if you still like it that's the sound of money that's what that sound is when I had amusement centers people would come in and say oh my gosh what's all that noise I said that's the sound of money because if it doesn't sound like that there's no money going into any of the games or any of the machines So you'll love to hear that sound. Right. Now, in terms of theme integration, I think this game really knocks it out of the park. Anybody familiar with the Wonka movie can really see that the design team really put out all stops to integrate as much as they could in the game in a very elegant way, I would say. Easily understood. Yes. Yes. So, now when it comes to, obviously you're a manufacturer, you need to sell these games. So when it comes to marketing, are you taking, I'm not sure what I can call it, pages out of the movie, so to speak. But, I mean, you could do something like there would be five golden tickets inserted in games somewhere that give people a privilege or something. That would not be cool. That would be cool. Is there anything you can say about that, if that's going to be the case? I could. Would you? Maybe. Let me give you a little more champagne here, Jack. I think your glass is running a bit dry. Let's see if that loosens your tongue at all. There we go. Oh, that felt it to the rim. Well, you know, those things, when you license a great property like this, it's really wonderful to follow the script and have those opportunities. The golden tickets certainly were great. Five of them, you know, they actually had six. They had one fake one. Fake news. They had fake golden tickets. Can you imagine that? Already in 1971. Yeah, they had a faker. Yeah, so we'll see how we market that. I know, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I know based on all the texts and emails and phone calls that I received just from a few hours ago when the game was officially released, you know, I would venture to say there were hundreds of games sold in less than, you know, certainly less than 24 hours, just in the last few hours. Distributors, there's some distributors ordering, you know, triple digit worth of games. Right. So it's a great problem to have, and we're thrilled. We're very humbled by it. We appreciate that. The marketing of something like this, the fun side of it, with doing something with golden tickets, is really great. You know, sometimes I get called by magazines, like Pinball Magazine wants me to advertise, and I say, you know, I really, I don't know, do I really need to advertise? Our games kind of sell themselves, you know. It's a wonderful problem to have, but we love it. doesn't mean I wouldn't advertise in your magazine. Well, speaking of which... You asked me a question. Yeah. You had a popular issue, right? What was it, issue number two was popular? Yes. And you asked me a question. Should I rerun that? Should you charge advertisers again if you reprint the magazine? Right. So what did you decide? I decided not to charge current advertisers unless they want to update their ad that was great because I wonder who came up with that idea yes we've had these discussions as well so you're not the only one that can ask questions you know well that's good that's great for the advertisers they got like double their money they got the popular magazine again and they didn't have to pay for an ad to run again. That's great. So, and even if they want to update their ad, then they're not going to be charged full 100% because it's going to be a smaller run. Finball Magazine is a great magazine. Yeah, I heard about it. I heard it won an award as well. Yeah, it's working. Yeah. So, I could see you win several with Willy Wonka as well. That would be great. Right. So, we're talking about the various aspects of the game. Do you want to tell us who, obviously Pat already designed it, but who else was involved in the team there? It's a big team, but who were the key team leaders in various aspects when they're programming the sound, the art, the video? You know, on the leader of the pack, you know certainly who that was, and it's Pat. It was really important to have John Yowsey do the artwork on the game. I do have a question about that, though. But continue first. Yep. Go ahead. What was your question? Well, obviously, there's the images of the various characters in the movies. Are these a photo that John incorporated in his artwork, or did he redraw the faces completely again? No, he redrew things. Yeah, he didn't just take it and cut and paste it. the good thing and the bad thing with a license is, you know, I said this for Wizard of Oz, what would the Wicked Witch of the West look like? She's got to look like the Wicked Witch of the West. You don't have poetic license to go 20% different than what she looks in the asset. So if you want poetic license, you better do an original theme. can you move off the line by a few percentage points and have your impression of that character, how that character looks? You could if you want to possibly take chances where you get comments and rejections. And I'm not saying that's the case of what happened, but this is why when you license those assets, you pay all the money. and I kind of started this whole thing with hand-drawn artwork with Wizard of Oz because everything for a very long time from different companies was just Photoshopped in and cut and paste kind of things. It's really a fine line to do. And we have the right people to do it so you get the right result. You get something that looks fresh and something that stays true to what the license wants you, wants you to do when you make it. Right. Now, I did understand because I listened to the Special Minded podcast who was discussing with the design team about the game that there were only licenses in place for two people who played Oompa Loompas. Right. Does that mean that the other Oompa Loompas in the game were sort of made up? Or did you take people from Jersey Jack Pinball and put them in the game? No, we can't do that. Otherwise, we could put your face in there. Well, or your own. We could do this in a ballroom. We actually put my face as the mayor in the Wizard of Oz because they didn't have the rights to all the munchkins. So our artist at the time was in a battle with Warner Brothers, which we shouldn't have been in, but he wanted to prove a point, and they went back and forth, and they said, well, we didn't have the faces, and then he put a bunch of our faces in and they said, well, you can't use those faces. And I said, well, why not? So they found some faces somehow for us to use. I don't know where they came from. They have an extra face department or someplace where it came from. Maybe it's the people working in that department that just wanted to be on the game. I don't know. But again, you can't use things you don't have the rights for. I mean, that sort of comes down to... There are scenes in movies like this where you have a central character in the foreground and you have 30 people in the background. And they don't have the rights to the 30 people in the background. So you can't blur them. You can't put something over that. You can't block them. You can't omit them. You can't use the scene. You can't use the scene because the scene needs to be used the way it was used in the movie. So there's a lot of me inventing a pinball machine with a big HD LCD was a great thing, I think, in my personal opinion. But of course these things bring other elements in They bring some challenges always and they bring a lot of benefit that outweighs the challenges But fortunately we have a very creative team and the cooperation from our licensor and we make things happen. We still get to the finish line of what that particular item might have been. So you mentioned Joe Katz as the lead software programmer. I thought that would be, he's Johnson or 10 Estes. They're working on other games. We have a deeper bullpen today. Bullpen. Champagne's not in the world. More champagne. So we have a deeper bullpen today than we had years ago. Joe is a great player. Joe's a great programmer. He's a great rulesmith. He's another guy that needs to come to the forefront and take the lead on a game. And it's really nice to see him do that. I like Joe a lot and I think he and the rest of the team did a great job. It doesn't mean that Ted and Keith, JT and a couple of the other guys didn't have a hand somewhere here and there. I don't know to what extent because luckily I'm not over their shoulder when they're pounding on the keyboard at two in the morning when they're writing all this stuff. Right. Okay. So animation still Jean-Paul DeWitt? And, you know, we're thrilled that it continues to be JP. JP is just a charm to work with. A lot of my mornings would start with a phone call to JP because he's a little bit ahead of me. I have to call him up. I have to ask him some things that are going on with submissions and approvals and things like that. And I think we really enjoy each other's conversations and each other's input and ideas on a lot of different things. I think he's just an amazing talent. He's a blessing to have in the company. He's great. He's a great guy. Right. So any specific mechanical engineering role that you can name? Yeah, I mean, you know, if I start mentioning one guy, I've got to go through the whole list. I mean, they're all really carrying a lot of weight of what needs to be done because before we can order a part, we need to make sure that part's engineered, they get tested, they get first samples, they get production run parts, and that all starts with engineering and the idea of what we're going to make through the team and how you're going to make something that actually is going to work and perform and be easily serviceable. So we have a lot of really good people. And mechanically, this is a standard body game, as was Pat's previous game. Is that the direction that you think the company is heading towards or looking to make all the games standard body or is still looking to have a mix of wider body as and when the design and title calls for it. That'll be left up to the design team. There's no bar on the... No, there's no mandate coming from anywhere that say from on high that everything is wide-body, everything is standard. I don't think you'll see us building an Atari-sized wide-body or a Paragon-sized wide-body or something wacky. We probably won't build a Hercules-sized game either. But I don't think you'll see a safecracker either. So it drives all people crazy in a way with different boxes, different packing materials. When we just think about it, Wizard of Oz that we did in the beginning is not the yellow brick road that we're building now. Because the whole body changed, because the head of the game changed, the boards are in the head now, things have been brought up to date. So there have been a lot of changes over the years. and most factories try to get to a stage where they standardize more things than change more things. We're still in a place where I bet maybe there's 80% of our games are different from each other, where other companies that do what we do, 90% or 80%, the bigger percentage of their game are the same rather than different. And there's a good reason to do that when you're a factory, because you can use a lot of the same things. maybe there's not such a good reason to do that because you have players asking in a polite way or demanding that things be much different than they played last time so when you see all five of our games together like Dave Christensen has them out there it's wonderful to look at because I don't see one that's better than another I just see all of them that are different from each other and they all really complement each other even subtle things like user interface you mentioned JP Every user interface on those screens is different from each other. So we keep it fresh. Right. Speaking of keeping things fresh, I'm getting back to the marketing bit a bit in the sense that with previous games, you did T-shirts for those games. There were T-shirts for Pirates. There were T-shirts for Dialed In. I think even for the Wizard of Oz, I think there were Jersey Jack t-shirts as well. You're here sitting next to us wearing a Wonka Bar t-shirt, which I'm not sure whether that is something that you created or whether it exists because it's just a Warner Brothers property that someone might have done. Now, we did see at the show, which I thought was very clever, little tiny Wonka bars, pieces of chocolate that usually go with a cup of coffee or something like that, which was a very nice gesture. So in terms of those assets, can you discuss if there are any plans in terms of T-shirts or other materials to promote the game or tie in with the game? You know, to me it's so interesting that people are very interested in different licensing aspects that pinball companies get into. Licenses, typically, and I'm not an expert, but I know enough to be dangerous, and to license things. I can deal with these people. when you get a license you get a category so if our license covered a commercial pinball machine it doesn't cover a t-shirt right so I know other companies go take stuff and make t-shirts I don't know that they get a license because with certain companies there's a minimum guarantee that you need to promise for the license category and then there's a percentage of sales or some other X per item or whatever. So obviously dialed in is our intellectual property. We can make all the dialed in stuff we want. Unfortunately, there were no Wizard of Oz t-shirts. There were a lot of Jersey Jack t-shirts because our logo or whatever we come up with. People love to wear our stuff and we recognize that. we could probably put a little bit more effort into that. You know, I put effort into it in the beginning when we weren't building games, we were building t-shirts. Well, you're building a company at that point. So you wanted to get your brand out there. Yeah, I mean... As much as Wizard of Oz wanted to get Jizzy Jack's pinball out. Yeah, and we do make a lot. We sell a tiny amount of them. Most of the time it's giveaways for charitable use or show use or, you know, pinball clubs of tournaments, things like that. We give a lot of that away. And really, it's not an expense to give it away in quotes because it's promotional value. People are wearing your name on their body. So that's pretty cool. We met up with somebody that had some rights to a different title that we were closing in on negotiating with to license something. and my mind was, gee, we could make wearables for this other item because we have a relationship with somebody who has a license. So that would be pretty cool. The shirt I'm wearing, I went on Amazon and bought it. It's a Warner Brothers. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't something that was a knockoff that I would be wearing. The tagline is under there, if you look in the microscope, for Warner Brothers S19 in 2019 and I don't want to be wearing some blue bag thing or whatever. But you can't produce Winnie Wonka and the Top Pit Factory pinball t-shirts without a license. We couldn't, but we could buy them from somebody who has a license. And, you know, in general terms, I'll say this about licensing anything, right? Anything you do needs to get the licensor's blessing. so if you had all assets that were approved let's say you had images and likenesses of anything that was approved and you made a brochure and now you write this brochure up that brochure typically to any licensor needs to get submitted to their marketing department to be blessed so you may say well all the components that are on this brochure have been approved so I can bless it myself and just say it's good. No. You know, typically with any licensor, you can't take an image. If Martin was a licensed property tomorrow, we couldn't take his picture and then put wording all over his body. Right. Because now we're covering up that image and likeness. So things like that, you can't do. But we know that stuff. We're professionals. We know that stuff. I'm sure you do. but another case comes to mind. I won't mention any brands or game names, but in this case, you're wearing this officially licensed Wonka Bar t-shirt. Yeah. But there's nothing stopping you from contacting the manufacturer saying, like, hey, I want to order, like, say, 500 shirts, but I want you to print my Jersey Jack logo on the back as well. Because the shirt is already licensed, and you're basically asking him to do something extra. Yeah. I don't know what his license says. And again, we're on a limb of a tree that's the supposition section of the tree. If he creates a shirt and his license says that whatever's on that shirt is what it is and now he adds something that violates that license, I have no clue. Does anybody care? Is it in the scheme of things? Does it harm anybody? Does it, you know, I mean... Well, the reason I'm bringing it up is because we've seen T-shirts in the past. Right. Well, you're a troublemaker, so that's why you bring it up. No, no, but I think it's a valid question. Well, we had a licensed superhero, and then basically it turned out to be an existing T-shirt where on the back an extra print was added. to avoid licensing. At least that's the way I look at it. So, again, in very general terms, when you sign a license agreement, some of the things in there that you promise to do is not take that property and without using a lot of legal language, not take that property and kind of convert it or subvert it or misuse it. Or you also sign part of that agreement that says you're going to protect that. you're going to protect that license. I remember when I signed the Hobbit license. If I gave away secrets about the third movie, I could be sued for what they think the loss of their movie box office sales would be. Imagine that. That's enough to compel you to keep your mouth shut. That would have been the least of my problem at that point. I would have been very, hello, dear Mr. Jack. So look, I would love it if we could control a lot of things which we can't control. But if we don't do it and we do what we're supposed to do, I can't control what other people do. In a technical sense, we provide the assets that are approved for our licenses to our distributors, and they promise to us that they're going to use those assets in the best way possible and they're not going to use them in a way that makes the property look bad or compromises the use of the property too. I mean, it gets into, we've had, listen, years ago, I had people have our games that weren't authorized to sell them and they were told they weren't authorized to sell them. Maybe they bought one game many years ago with Wizard of Oz to mess up the marketplace. And somebody bought a Wizard of Oz game from somebody and put it on eBay back in 2013. I got in touch with eBay and I said, listen, this is my intellectual property. It's licensed by us. And this person is selling it and they're trying to say they're an authorized distributor. And they're not. I want you to pull the auction down. I pulled the auction down. there have been times when I went to copy shops like Kinko's or Staples to make up brochures for a license that I have and the person in the store said to me with Hobbit we can't make this for you because this violates copyright law because we can't copy this stuff because you don't have a license for it but hang on a minute, I'll be right back I went to the car, I got the license and gave it to them you know, they're protecting, they're doing the rules of their business. You know, today's a different world with copyright infringement and enforcement and intellectual property rights. And, you know, we know this is a battle, part of the whole tariff thing going on in the world in different countries. You know, it's a whole gigantic other conversation. I'm certainly not an expert about it. But within reason, our job is to protect the property that we licensed. before we close this or round this off you did bring your wife Joanne so I was wondering with not only she keeping up with you for which you should be very grateful I think but she also giving birth to both your children who are both working at Jersey Jack and your Italian heritage basically I tend to think like Joanne is sort of running the company like it used to be in good Italian tradition. Well, back in the day, I guess that would be true. But Joanne is not involved in the business really other than in support of all of us and trials and tribulations and successes going on. And she told me that you asked her to interview her, so she ran away to the hotel. I figured that would make sense. Yeah, she probably wouldn't. She might sing you a couple of songs, but she probably wouldn't be interviewed. That would be a first anyway. Yeah, yeah. No other people podcast has ever had Jack Guarnieri's wife singing on a podcast. That would be great. She's great. And, you know, she doesn't come to many shows. She likes pinball. But she's not going to be piled in the show as we are, you know, all day long and all night long sometimes and everything. So I was happy she came. I kind of had to twist her arm a little to get her to come, but it worked out okay. And you had a nice time in Paris before you... We had a great time. Yeah, we had a great time. We saw a bunch of customers and got to see some sights and the Carl Weathers wasn't as warm as it was last year when I was here. I think last year we were here a week or two later and it must have made a difference because last time I was walking in Paris last year it was like 84 degrees and this time... And we were sitting outside doing this interview. Yeah, it was beautiful. I mean, it's still nice being with you guys for sure but I guess 10 days or 2 weeks make a difference in the spring time especially in France right ok well thank you very much indeed for taking time out from this busy show and your busy schedule to come and talk to us there ain't no more shimp absolutely there's a little bit here I shall tuck up your grass as it's like you know those radio shows where you used to drink and the guy would pour whatever in there and they'd make believe that they were drinking yeah Dean Martin yeah that's right yeah that's it oh it's all gone ok so thank you very much anyway Jack and thank you for taking part in our special special podcast yes so thank you to Jack Warnieri sorry for being a little bit long winded at the end about licensing all that stuff that's really boring for some of you but that is where pinball is going a lot these days in licensing so it's probably one of the most torturous processes in the whole development of pinball is getting everything agreed with the licensor and making sure you don't infringe on anything. Right. So anyway, so we're still at the Flip Expo show in France, which might actually be the very last edition of this show, as there are rumours going around that there will not be a follow-up show next year. We hope the rumours will turn out to be not true. So while we're still here, we're enjoying the show. There will be a show report on the Flip Expo show on both pinballnews.com as well as on pinball-magazine.com. And we hope you enjoyed this bonus interview podcast with Jack Warnieri. And don't forget to check out both our sites for details of the launch of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and all the game features, the prices, and the differences between the models and everything you want to know about Willy Wonka. Right. So that's it for now. In two weeks we'll be back with our regular monthly summary of pinball news, which is also going to be very interesting. so please stay tuned and check out our upcoming podcast as well yes we'll talk to you again then ok thanks very much bye bye