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Zen Studios Interview with Mel Kirk

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 16m·analyzed·Sep 16, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Zen Studios reveals Williams Valley release date, pricing, and dual classic/remastered gameplay modes.

Summary

Steve Kirk, VP of Publishing at Zen Studios, announces Williams Valley's integration into Pinball FX with a release date of October 9th. Volume 1 includes Junkyard, Medieval Madness, and Getaway: High Speed 2 at $9.99, with Fishtails free to all players. Zen is offering both classic and remastered versions of these games with toggleable physics and visual enhancements, while respecting the original gameplay design.

Key Claims

  • Williams Valley Volume 1 releases October 9th on Pinball FX and Zen Pinball 2 platforms

    high confidence · Steve Kirk stated directly in interview; specific platforms listed (Xbox, PS4, Win 10, Steam, Switch, Mac)

  • Volume 1 will be priced at $9.99 for three tables (Junkyard, Medieval Madness, Getaway: High Speed 2)

    high confidence · Steve Kirk announced pricing explicitly; noted as same price as standard Zen 3-pack

  • Fishtails will be free to all new players, joining Sorcerer's Lair as the second free table

    high confidence · Steve Kirk stated Fishtails is his personal favorite game that got him into pinball; free inclusion confirmed

  • Zen license agreement covers entire scope of Williams/Bally including System 11, older games, and EMs

    high confidence · Steve Kirk: 'our license agreement covers the entire scope of loyals valley so anything that they produce uh we we can remake if we want to that includes us 11 um older stuff all everything there'

  • Players can toggle between classic and remastered versions of games with a single button press

    high confidence · Chris and Jared confirmed ability to toggle; Mel described feature as seamless with details about physics, visuals, and difficulty modes

  • Zen is considering applying new Williams physics to existing Zen table catalog

    medium confidence · Steve Kirk: 'we're talking about that' and 'it's on our list of things to do' but acknowledged significant resource and prioritization challenges

  • Scientific Games gave Zen freedom and trust on licensing details; they focus on big-picture vision only

    medium confidence · Steve Kirk described their relationship as trusting, noting they don't require consultation on small details but do engage on important decisions

  • FX3 was explicitly designed with Williams Valley license in mind as part of broader 'pinball universe' platform strategy

    high confidence · Steve Kirk: 'FX3 was designed with a lot of things in mind. It was designed with volumes in mind' and described vision of hub for classic and modern games

Notable Quotes

  • “Williams Valley, and this whole project is a marathon. It's not a sprint. We've just gotten started, but so far, so good.”

    Steve Kirk @ early interview — Sets expectation management for long-term development and community patience; indicates sustained commitment beyond initial release

  • “Fishtails is actually going to be free for everybody... it's my favorite game. It's the game that got me into pinball. So I just felt like I want to give it to everybody.”

    Steve Kirk @ pricing section — Personal stake in decision; positions generosity as accessibility strategy for new players

  • “These games, as they exist, to us, to our fan base, these are perfect creations. So why would we mess with them?”

    Steve Kirk @ remaster philosophy discussion — Core design philosophy: enhancement without alteration; respects Williams legacy games as finished works

  • “It still needs to maintain the same game. What can we do aesthetically? What can we do with the visuals?”

    Steve Kirk @ design constraints discussion — Clarifies boundary: visual/aesthetic enhancement only, no rule rewrites or complete redesigns allowed

  • “Zen, we're one of the longest-lasting independent game studios, and when I get to interview people, I say, how'd you guys do? What's your secret? I say we just listen to people.”

    Steve Kirk @ philosophy section — Core company ethos around customer-driven development; positioning Zen as listener-focused independent

  • “It was designed to be the destination, the hub for all things pinball. Classic games, modern-day games, pinball news, information, tournament play.”

    Steve Kirk @ FX3 strategy discussion — Articulates FX3's strategic scope beyond just games; positioning as comprehensive pinball ecosystem

  • “I wouldn't run that by them necessarily. That would be a decision that Zen could make on our own.”

    Steve Kirk @ prototype features discussion — Indicates Zen has autonomy on production-run details (like Cactus Canyon stickers) without Scientific Games approval

Entities

Steve KirkpersonChrispersonJared MorganpersonZen StudioscompanyScientific GamescompanyWilliams ValleyproductPinball FXproductJunkyardgame

Signals

  • ?

    announcement: Official announcement of Williams Valley Volume 1 release date (October 9th) with three classic Williams tables and free Fishtails at $9.99 price point

    high · Mel Kirk stated: 'Games are going to be releasing October 9th on volume one, which includes Junkyard. Medieval Madness and the Getaway High Speed 2' and 'volume one will cost $9.99'

  • ?

    product_launch: Launch feature enabling seamless toggle between classic and remastered versions with separate physics models, visual enhancements, and difficulty modes

    high · Chris and Jared confirmed 5-week beta experience toggling between modes; Mel described comprehensive feature set with classic/remastered/physics/visuals all independently adjustable

  • ?

    product_strategy: Zen's license covers entire Williams/Bally catalog including EMs and System 11; volumes 1-3 pre-planned with focus on popular titles first, then fan service additions

    high · Mel Kirk: 'our license agreement covers the entire scope of loyals valley so anything that they produce uh we we can remake if we want to that includes us 11 um older stuff all everything'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Zen's core approach: visual and aesthetic enhancements only, no rule rewrites or complete redesigns; respects original games as 'perfect creations'

    high · Mel Kirk: 'These games, as they exist, to us, to our fan base, these are perfect creations. So why would we mess with them?' and 'It still needs to maintain the same game'

  • ?

    business_signal: FX3 explicitly designed as comprehensive 'pinball universe' hub integrating classic games, news, tournament play, museum highlights, and community features

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.228

0:00
this is the blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you're listening to the blockade pinball podcast i'm your host freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan hello chris it sounds like you're calling from outer mongolia how are you today you know everything was going just fine was all getting prepared for the show and then all of a sudden out went the internet so I am doing this via mobile phone oh yes I know what having no internet is all about mate so I feel exactly what you're talking about there it's horrible there's nothing like working perfectly fine all day long and you think everything's going great and then poof Just before you're about to record. Yep, just before you're about to record. Fantastic. Wonderful stuff. Thanks, Spectrum.
1:07
So what's been going on? Well, folks, we have had just busy podcast after busy podcast, haven't we? It's almost too much, and today we have yet another busy podcast. Yeah. Because joining us in just a few moments is going to be Mel Kirk, the VP of Publishing over at Zed. And we've got a host of questions to berate him with, but he's also got announcements to make, which will just give us more fuel for the fire to talk about probably next week and beyond.
1:41
Probably. With no further ado, why don't we just hop straight into this, and Mel, say hi. Hey, guys. How are you all doing today? We're doing fantastic. You have been all over the place these last two weeks. I've seen you pop up in print interviews. I've seen you pop up in video interviews.
2:00
Just busy, busy times there, huh? It is. It's really busy. Obviously, the news of Williams Valley coming to Pinball FX and under Zen's care is a pretty meaningful bit of news. In the pinball world, I would argue also just in general entertainment and video games. So we've been busy. It's nice that people want to talk and really care about this. And so we're trying to be as available as possible. So here I am also with you guys. I'm really, really glad to just talk to you directly. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's great to have you on the show.
Medieval Madness
game
The Getaway: High Speed IIgame
Fishtailsgame
Sorcerer's Lairgame
Cactus Canyongame
Judge Dreddgame
Whirlwindgame
BlahCade Pinball Podcastorganization
Pinball Arcadeproduct
Farsight Studioscompany
Zaccariacompany
Star Wars: Solo tableproduct
Scared Stiffgame
Creature from the Black Lagoongame
Indiana Jonesgame
Budapest Pinball Museumorganization
Pacific Pinball Museumorganization

high · Mel Kirk: 'FX3 was designed with a lot of things in mind... I wanted to be the destination, the hub for all things pinball... a pinball platform'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Third-party IP licenses restrict mixing of brands in single packs (e.g., cannot combine Twilight Zone with Judge Dredd); Universal properties allow bundling (e.g., Creature from Black Lagoon with Monster Bash)

    high · Mel Kirk explained licensing prevents mixing unrelated IPs but allows grouping under parent license holder; gave Universal Monsters example as allowable

  • ?

    product_concern: Lengthy internal discussion at Zen regarding ESRB ratings and family mode implementation for Medieval Madness, Scared Stiff, and Creature from Black Lagoon

    medium · Mel Kirk: 'It's an ongoing discussion right now here at Zen. It's probably actually the longest email thread about the game' regarding ESRB family mode decisions

  • ?

    code_update: New 'Pro Physics' model developed for Williams tables; Zen considering applying to existing Zen table catalog but assessing resource requirements per-table

    medium · Mel Kirk acknowledged customer requests for physics application to Zen tables, noting 'every table has to have personal attention to it' due to collision/surface material remapping needs

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Zen reconsidering announcement timing strategy; planning to announce games further in advance (rather than 1-month pre-release) to allow collection of production-run details and nuances

    medium · Mel Kirk: 'we're going to probably take a little bit of a different approach with our communication, probably announce things maybe a little more in advance'

  • ?

    community_signal: Mixed but predominantly positive reception to Williams Valley announcement; tension between Zen purists who prefer original designs vs. new players attracted by modernization

    medium · Mel Kirk noted 'we knew we'd get a little bit of that' regarding comments like 'Oh no, not real pinball' on Zen's Facebook, but overall feedback described as 'very positive'

  • ?

    rumor_hype: Community actively speculating on EM table inclusion in future Williams Valley volumes; Nip It and Captain Fantastic mentioned as potential candidates for Zen's visual enhancement treatment

    low · Mel Kirk and Chris discussed EM possibilities including hypothetical examples like Nip It's alligator mouth or Captain Fantastic with Elton John visuals; Mel noted licensing constraints with EM research from Gottlieb focus

  • ?

    operational_signal: BlahCade hosts given 5-week exclusive beta access to Williams Valley tables on PFX3 beta; discovery of toggle feature surprised testers, indicating successful secret-keeping

    high · Chris: 'me and Jared have been able to play with this for five weeks now' and 'folks, you know how hard it is to keep a secret like this? It's incredibly difficult'

    • 2:32
    Yeah, it's awesome to be here. I listened to your last few podcasts. You guys are spot on. You guys are like a pinball. So always good to talk to you. how has it been i know that you guys were a little bit nervous prior to the announcement of uh how this was going to be received both by your regular zen customers and by all the customers who are used to playing uh the williams tables and pinball arcade um i gotta imagine it's been kind of a breath of release with how the reception has been going yeah i gotta say uh we're we feel really good. It's been a little bit of the pressure. It feels a little bit removed, but we're not done yet. The feedback we've gotten is very positive, so we feel good about the game, but this is just the beginning. We're looking at Williams Valley, and this whole project is a marathon. It's not a sprint. We've just gotten started, but so far, so good. We seem to be earning people's trust, at least their willingness to give us a shot at this and to just have the dialogue about what kind of game that they want to play. So that's all we could have asked for at this point.
    3:39
    Yeah. I, we commented on the previous week where I'd gone on to Facebook and looked at the Zen page just to see what the comments were. And it was interesting seeing a completely different perspective, which is the customer that is solely a Zen fan and seeing comments of like, Oh no, not real pinball. That's boring.
    4:01
    Yeah. We knew we'd get a little bit of that, But I think we've got something in our back pocket, you know, which we're going to talk about today. Yeah. So why don't we why don't you go ahead and talk about that right now? Because I think that'll leave some of those people's concerns and also enlighten the other sides. Yeah. So let's talk about our news for today. First of all, we have a we have a release date for you.
    4:25
    Games are going to be releasing October 9th on volume one, which includes Junkyard. Medieval Madness and the Getaway High Speed 2. That's going to be on Pinball FX for Xbox, PlayStation 4, Win 10, Steam, Nintendo Switch, and then Zen Pinball 2 on Mac. Now, you might notice I didn't mention Fishtails because Fishtails is not a part of Volume 1. Fishtails is actually going to be free for everybody. Oh, nice. Yeah.
    4:55
    So now you get Sorcerer's Lair as a free table and Fishtails as a free table. Correct. So any new player coming to FX3? That's right. Two free tables. One original work by Zen and then in Fishtails, which, you know, I'm kind of proud because it's my favorite game. It's the game that got me into pinball. So I just felt like I want to give it to everybody. That's what we're doing.
    5:21
    Awesome. Do we have yet any kind of pricing announcement for the volume one? Yes, I can tell you that volume one will cost $9.99. That'll get you all three tables.
    5:34
    That's fantastic. That's very, very well priced. That's basically what the going rate on a standard Zen 3-pack is, so it's really wonderful that it's the same price despite being this awesome license. Yeah. Good. I'm glad you agree. We feel like we can be aggressive like that. It's a $9.99 price. And I have one other thing to tell you. Yes, more.
    6:02
    We're just doing it all here. We're just rushing it all at once. Not only in the $9.99 price are you going to get – now that sounds too salesy. Sorry.
    6:13
    You're going to get the classic mode, but Xen is also making remastered versions of these games. And what does that mean? That means that there's a version of the game that is going to play a little more like a modern pinball experience like you used to from Xen. We're talking about 3D interactive characters. We're talking about ball effects, particle effects, sidewall art, different type of arcade type of features that you know in pinball. So we have the classic play, and you've got this remastered version. You're going to get all of that in the same package. At a toggle button, like on your PlayStation, you just push the O button. You can switch back and forth between the classic game and the remastered game, and you can play it however you want. You can play with the classic physics or with the new pro physics that we've come out with. and it's up to you how you want to play, but all that is going to exist. And finally, if you're on PC and you're in the PFX3 beta right now, you can play them right now.
    7:06
    Yeah, me and Jared have been able to play with this for five weeks now. Yeah, folks, you know how hard it is to keep a secret like this? It's incredibly difficult.
    7:18
    And you have no idea, Mel, the excitement we had when we discovered that push of the button it was like whoa what the heck just happened because i thought that it was just going to be purely if you're playing single player mode then you get all the the whiz bang of a zen table and then if you're playing classic single player no you were stuck in in that mode and i accidentally my thumb hit the button that was like what just happened yeah me too totally the same experience it was just like whoa what what was this surprise it's so cool so cool yeah yeah like the team really worked hard to make that uh possible it's very seamless as you know you guys have been playing yeah and so that was you know the way that we just approached this whole thing was like you know uh we just wanted people to be able to do what they want whenever they want and that seemed like the easiest thing to make it happen because then you can actually really appreciate maybe what we've done differently um because you can just sit there go back and forth and you really you get a sense of you know, and like what Zen can add to a game. So this is something... It's also one of these things that we've been dying to mention is that the single-player mode plays exactly like all the Zen tables that you've been used to. The flipper angle, it goes a little bit higher. It actually matches what was in Pinball Arcade. So catches are way easier. It kind of makes it... Makes Pinball accessible to mobile. To those that aren't into Pinball. Yeah, correct. Or our intent to real pinball while adding all the crazy Zen effects that a lot of us really do appreciate in many aspects.
    8:58
    I'm curious to know how crazy is too crazy when applying the stuff to the Williams tables? Yeah, and that's a really good question. Something that we've been asking ourselves a lot. And with this first, you know, with Volume 1 releasing, we've taken it to a certain limit, I would say. Yeah. And we thought it made sense. We thought it would enhance the game, but we didn't want to mess with the game too much. We didn't want to interfere with the classic gameplay experience. We didn't want it to feel like Zen is just walking in here and messing around with something that's already perfect. Because these games, as they exist, to us, to our fan base, these are perfect creations. So why would we mess with them? and we're aware that some of you are going to ask that question. This is also part of why Zen is working with these games now is, you know, a lot of people, especially like my kids, younger generation, never heard of these games. They've never played them. They might not play them unless there's something moving around on them. So it's a way to introduce them to a new audience. And so we want to take the right steps and the right progression with it. So we've gone to a certain extent with Volume 1. We definitely want to hear from everybody what you think. We can take it further. I mean, in Infinity Gauntlet, we put the whole table upside down, so there's nothing wrong with it.
    10:13
    But it's got to make sense. So that's kind of the approach and the thinking around it this first time around. I'm a bit curious because one of the things that I immediately thought of as potential was, oh, my God, if you're playing Whirlwind, instead of the spinner discs, suddenly up can pop tornadoes. And would have the – essentially the same physics would happen with flinging the ball around, but now you've got this awesome visual. But then I immediately went, ah, but that's an alphanumeric. And there is also a problem with your newer generation of players where they expect a DMD. Would it be possible? I know it's technically possible, but is it a consideration of Zen to maybe go ahead and create your own DMD of that very game to bring it up to spec on that? It's a possibility. We're talking about it. It all falls into this, you know, what kind of line should we be walking? and how far should we go? I kind of have a feeling that once people play these, they're going to say, Zen, you might as well just make full-blown new ones. But we're not going to rewrite rules or create different modes. It still needs to maintain the same game. What can we do aesthetically? What can we do with the visuals? What can we do, you know, just the enhancement of it? But, you know, I don't think we're ever going to, like, go from the ground up and just completely, like, remake Whirlwind. And that's a little outside of actually what our agreement is and what we're kind of tasked to do. Okay. Right. Because we actually had the folks from Zacharia on the show a few episodes ago, and they've done some very interesting things with their remake tables where they've taken the sort of, I guess, the theme of the table and really just modernized the whole thing. And it really was quite a very interesting gameplay experience and overall sort of freshening up of what are generally really good, solid old tables. So I can understand, though, if there are some limitations contractually that mean you can't go too crazy. You've got to sort of keep the properties the way they sort of were originally intended. Well, and also with some of the license content here, we're dealing with other people who own licenses, and it looks like a completely different type of deal if you want to make something new versus you taking something old and re-releasing it. So even though you have to say they're okay with us doing the enhancements, we're trying to get away with saying it's not a completely new from the ground up product. If we're just talking about one of those ballet tables that they own all the aspects to, that might be possible. If we hear enough like, hey, just completely remake this game, we might consider that. But the license side of things, it's just complicated. Anytime you're going to do something like that, it's even more complicated. It's really one of those things you've got to ask before you just do it.
    12:59
    Yeah, no, you never just do. At least that's the way Zen operates. Right. Yeah. So essentially what we're going to be getting now is we're going to have three different difficulty modes, wherein if you play single player, you get the standard Zen mode. If you go into classic single player, then you get basically whatever we've been playing in the demo these past two weeks, as well as tournament mode. So it's really kind of pick your portion. Three different play styles. Exactly. And yet you can still get the visuals however you like in all three manners. Because even in single player, you can turn off the whiz-bang and have it look just like the standard table.
    13:37
    Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So because we have the three different difficulties, and I know you've maybe heard this question now, So would it be possible to, in the standard Zen tables, under the classic single player of those old tables, to use these new physics that are being applied to these Williams tables? Yeah, we're talking about that. I know we've discussed it amongst this group here. Also, I was on Steam the other day just answering questions and gathering feedback because we did a physics update, and I just wanted to see what the response was. And that was one of the first questions was like, hey, can you take these physics and put them on all your other games? And so, yeah, we hear the request. I think it's a worthwhile thing for us to do in studio. We're actually trying to estimate the time, the resources involved with that. And then, I mean, also trying to prioritize what everybody wants, because there's a lot. And quality takes takes time. And so we don't want to rush. it's on our list of things to do.
    14:44
    So here's what's funny about me, right? I'm actually enjoying the new ProPhysics quite a bit. So I do want to play other tables with those physics. And so I think that at some point we can make that happen. My personal request is just start with Aliens.
    15:02
    Yeah, Aliens is a – you're right, Chris. Aliens has a really real pinball feel to it. It does. And it will be very interesting to see what the actual Williams physics felt like on that. I remember a while back, I think I might have asked a question, probably this was probably about two years ago now, I think, where on the original tables, it would have been quite technically difficult to redo all the collisions and all that sort of stuff on the tables. Because essentially, when you apply a new physics model to a table, you've got to remap everything, right? so I'd imagine that's the thing that the studio is contemplating at the moment going through their entire back catalog of tables and working out wow this is going to take x number of weeks months whatever you know a lot of undertaking I mean we have a big portfolio right we have a lot of tables um and some of our secret sauce I you know I don't I'm not going to just give it away here but there's you're on to something though with the collisions surface materials um all that kind of stuff you know we need to make adjustments it's not like we just say you know deploy one line of code and they're all changing every table has to have personal attention to it yeah yeah that's exactly the same as fast lights tuning model as well so they they have to they had to pretty much per table even the physics for the flippers per table they had to actually tweak so we understand or we have at least some idea about the just the sheer volume of work this would actually flow onto if you do decide to do that. So yeah, totally, totally get it.
    16:33
    Mel, we've been getting a lot of questions regarding, obviously we're starting off with four DMD tables, and the immediate question everybody went was, what about System 11 Williams, and what about EMs? What is the scope of the license? I assume it covers anything Valiant Williams, and then what is the scope of what Xen is going to be kind of angling on? okay yeah uh our license agreement covers the entire scope of loyals valley so anything that they produce uh we we can remake if we want to that includes us 11 um older stuff all everything there um our primary i think what we focus on first at least for volume one two and three are laid out is uh you know some of the bigger names some of the things that people obviously are the most popular really establish the product give people what they want the most if you look at what we've done maybe even with Marvel I'll go back to our Marvel collection then you kind of start to get into the fan service Marvel we did Moon Knight I was just going to say Moon Knight our history is about fan service so yeah you'll see there will be fan service here there will be things that are off the beaten path that people will be excited to hear about it might not be the most popular thing previously but yeah, we want to give everybody a taste of everything. Because there was where I was thinking also, especially if you did delve into EMs, oh my god, you could totally go nuts with the Zenified version to make them look completely different than anybody's ever thought of an EM. Yeah.
    18:15
    I'll take you to look. If you were going to do an EM game, what would be your top two that you'd want to see? Oh god. that's a very good question because you know to be honest we've mostly been immersed in the Gottlieb era ems with um with Pimble RK because that was you know a lot of the I mean really the Gottliebs are the really good em sort of things but there are some Williams and belly ems out there that um I'll give you an example of just one that people would probably maybe have recognized just from seeing it on tv from happy days a good old nip it where it's kind of got that swamp alligator theme going on. And one of the gates that you walk the ball behind I don know in my mind I always imagined it being an alligator mouth if you will So I mean that the kind of thing where it just like oh wow you could really apply that touch to it and make it something more. Or even to the extent of, I believe, what was it, Captain Fantastic? Or Six Million Dollar Man, although that's kind of a more solid state.
    19:20
    Whereas just how awesome would it be to see Elton John dancing around on the table or Steve Austin running around doing bionic things.
    19:28
    It's okay. It's okay with that, but even if you didn't go as far as that, that would be great because it would actually add a lot of, I think, for the original custom bases and that would really appeal to them. But a lot of the problem with the ENs, of course, is they were pre-flashes. So the engagement you get from the playfield lights and all that sort of stuff isn't as rich as you would on an early Salt State where they started to introduce the automotive flashes. So even putting effects like that into those EM tables and sort of creating your own light shows around them would actually add to the appeal of those tables really quite a lot, I think.
    20:05
    I totally agree. Of course, the other thing we're considering, and this is a very big picture, is we've got to see what the response is to this. Yeah. You know, Zen, we're one of the longest-lasting independent game studios, and when I get to interview people, I say, how'd you guys do? What's your secret? I say we just listen to people.
    20:25
    They've got to tell us what they want and we try to do that. So when people are responding, they're buying the game, they're enjoying the game. We see that, okay, we're going to have a long history here. We're going to do this. All goes back to the risk of Zen doing this in the first place. But there isn't anything that we can't do. There isn't anything we can't bring. I hear comment, like tons of requests for comment.
    20:47
    I mean, I don't know. We'll see where it goes. That's because that's one of the triplet of carnival games that we didn't get was Comet, which I always used to go, what, you got Cyclone? That's basically Comet with an extra ramp. So shut up.
    21:03
    Yeah. One of the other things, and we've been used to being able to adjust our lighting with these tables. And obviously Xen has had locked-in lighting, but then somebody popped in and was like, oh, that's what the gamma control is for, which is not really true lighting adjustment that's in Xen. It's just kind of a darkening of the table or whatever. Have you guys considered doing any kind of, allowing us to do any kind of lighting adjustment? Or is it going to be more, and I'll bring this up with the most recent table pack you guys released, with the Star Wars pack of Solo. In the Solo table, there's a moment where the entire table just blacks out, and it's basically just a spotlight of light hitting it. And my immediate response was, oh, my God, that's exactly perfect for if you're doing Circus Voltaire and neon multiball pops up or doing strobe multiball and attack from Mars. So that's where it was kind of curious. Is it going to be kind of – is Zen more likely to do that approach or let the users have control of what the lighting would actually look like? Yeah, and that's not a feature that we have developed along the way with FX3 over our history. so our feature for changing lighting is a little more restricted a lot of that has to do with the fact that the IPs that we've dealt with previously, we're making very modern stuff based on current IP and they didn't want players to be able to change it to then show it and have it be a different representation of what they wanted to do so that's why we never really focus on that feature here we are coming into this, it's a little different because there's some precedent, there's some history with these tables before, having the lighting being so adjustable. So, again, it's a feature that we've got on our roadmap, and we're very aware that people want it. And, you know, so hopefully eventually we can get to that. But that's a little bit of the history and the context why we don't have it now.
    23:00
    Yeah, I think that context is really important. Let's delve into a little licensing with the Williams license, if you're able to. I'm not trying to go into exactly what happened and whatever but I'm curious was FX3 because last year it was just kind of like you guys sprung on us guess what we've been working on for a year it's FX3 and it was like wait did we ask for this? No but cool and then we started playing and it was like this is amazing I'm wondering was FX3 designed with the Williams license in mind or is it just a coincidence of timing?
    23:42
    Yeah, FX3 was designed with a lot of things in mind. It was designed to, yes, you hit the nail on the head there. It was designed with volumes in mind. I look at Pinball FX3 as a pinball universe. Lots of different things. We want to be the destination, the hub for all things pinball. Classic games, modern-day games, pinball news, information, tournament play. We're highlighting the Budapest Pinball Museum. We're highlighting the Pacific Pinball Museum. anything pinball related I wanted to live in pinball FX and so this destination that we're trying to create and this connected community that we're trying to create has room for different kinds of people and different kinds of players of various skill sets, interests, all that stuff so absolutely FX3 was designed for this in mind it's a pinball platform yeah how is scientific involved in anything other than basically collecting the royalty checks, or are you guys having to consult with them? How involved are they? Have they given you basically complete freedom?
    24:47
    They've given us freedom. They trust us. They see the history of Zen, our quality product, our commitment to customer service, our commitment to doing licensing correctly and consulting on important things. that they don't care if we're making on some very little detail kind of stuff a big picture. They like our vision, and that's what they're involved in. So does that mean that you would even have the freedom to, let's say, do a prototype version of a game, and where we'd say that is like take Judge Dredd, where the release version did not have Dead World spinning because operators were worried it was breaking, but the prototype versions, it always was, And so there was no cost issue digitally to make that a thing or Cactus Canyon where they didn't put the stickers on the pop up drop targets. Is that something that you guys would be allowed to implement then? Yeah, those are details. Well, Judge Dredd is a license, so we'd have to work with the license holder as well. Sure. Cactus Canyon. We that's not something I would necessarily run by, you know, just to give you a little bit of the way we work. I wouldn't run that by them necessarily. That would be a decision that Zen could make on our that we can make on our own. Okay. Oh, that's fantastic. That is, yeah, because that was one of the issues that was with Farsight having the license. They were mandated you can only release what production run was. And that was always irksome because it was like, oh, but what about this little item that was just – it's a cool little feature that everybody that owns the table mods their table in this manner. Like, you know, Firepower with drop targets and stand-ups, for example. Right, or Earthshaker, where the earthquake center drops and raises. And on the production around the table, they just left it standing because, again, it was like, oh, that's an extra motor. That's going to cost extra money. Let's eliminate that. So the first commitment is to make the game as true to form as possible. Absolutely. And then, you know, like, I don't know that we're, you know, the way we operate when we're going to announce a game to the time it comes is somewhat, we try to be quick. We try to be within a month because everyone just wants these things so quick. But we are thinking to ourselves, maybe we need to build in a little more time and then just announce things and say, hey, these are the next games we're working on and make sure that we collect all of these little – because there's a lot. A lot of these games have, like you just mentioned with Cactus Canyon, all these little nuances or little things about them. Make sure we get all those in because it's much easier to do it when you're in development than it is to patch that in and go back and do a better – So we're going to probably take a little bit of a different approach with our communication, probably announce things maybe a little more in advance and collect all this info and then make sure before we go gold and before we cut off development, like, we know that we've got it all. That's great to hear. Because I know that, you know, submissions on consoles do tend to cost a little bit, so you can't really do a lot of resubmissions on them, right? Yeah. Mel, I heard you mention on a different interview where you're mentioning with third party licensing, when you guys do finally get around to that, that kind of similar to what your third party licensing is now, that they don't want their licenses being mixed with other brand licenses. You know, it's kind of a sole single focus. And what that made me think of, and I'm just going to use this as an example because we all know this is the holy grail of what everybody is asking for, but take a table like Indiana Jones and knowing what you guys normally do, say with the Star Wars licensing,
    28:18
    is it conceivable that you could do a pack where it's here's the actual Williams table and here's now Zen creations using the Indiana Jones universe, if you will, kind of like what you guys did with the Mim Bomb table with the Solo and Lando. Yes, that sort of thing is possible. so like if we were to do that if we were to do indie and then like you and we were going to make original indie tables we could because it's Indiana Jones because it's Disney we could do that there would have to be and Williams I'm sure it would approve like there's no scientific but yeah like if it's a brand I'll associate with this brand that's fine we couldn't do I think I don't know I remember what the example was but like I couldn't do like Twilight Zone and Judge Dredd together in a pack right it needs to be on theme Universal is a good example. I can do Creature of the Black Lagoon, and we can do Monster Bash together because those are universals. Right, they're universal monsters, and that opens up the possibility that if you guys want to do your own universal monsters table or multi-pack or whatever, that that would be thrown in. Okay, great. That's excellent news. Yeah, yeah. something else that's we're going to skip off the licensing questions for a moment and dip into another area that we've been getting a lot of stuff based off of this one came from your Facebook live chat and it had to do with the boy the ratings the ESR and specifically having the family mode on medieval madness, but then we also realized that's going to mean scared stiff. That's going to mean creature from the black lagoon. Can you talk us through the, the ESRD rating and why with the exact same rating, Farsight was able to release some of these tables without the family mode on. Yeah. And actually glad you asked this question. It's an ongoing discussion right now here at Zen. It's probably actually the longest email thread about the game that I have. we kind of feel good we kind of feel like if this is our problem we're doing okay but yeah i know that it's really important uh there's there's a group of very very vocal people right now who are actually like we're gonna boycott zen this isn't real pinball you guys are destroying things here's what i have to say because the decision isn't final here at zen we're looking into it because they're this is a big tangled mess is the biggest way i can say it um i'll start with the history of FX3 being E10+, with descriptors of mild violence. Fantasy violence and mild language. We have millions of people who have downloaded FX3 with that ESRB rating. Parents have let their kids play content. They're buying Star Wars, they're buying Marvel, whatever. They're playing these games. That's good. The game to them is rated that. If we change the rating,
    31:21
    there's some action that Zen has to take to actually legally notify all of them. It can be done in-game. But then we're also with ESRB and all the other ratings boards, which are actually more strict than ESRB. We need to satisfy all those people and have some way for them to literally opt out of game if they're not happy that the game has increased their rating. So our current customer base is affected. That's one thing. two um we are looking into the fact if we can just list the extra descriptors because we don't want to go to team um you're right that's just one thing i'm not willing to do i'm not willing to put content in there to go all the way to t i am willing to go um to add the um mild blood um there's some other there's some other things uh there's two more descriptors um sorry i don't have my sure you probably know so we'd end up with these uh three new descriptors and that would actually cover there's an alcohol reference in there too that would actually cover the majority of stuff but I'll just say this that there were some games that were actually released under Fireside's ESRB that due to ESRB's automated system were missed and that game should have been rated higher than it was and that's just the truth on all the other ones I don't know what their ratings were in line with that content. Would it be...
    32:50
    Because one of the things... Basically, we thought of two things. One, if it was standard... Family mode was the standard way the game came. And then by doing the old age sign-in, that you could flip the ROM to be able to do the... Basically, admitting that you're accepting of this other material. And then you would be able to play the non-family version. Those are some options. On Steam, you could definitely do that. Consoles, we probably wouldn't get away with that. Other territories might be able to. But what happens to us? So what if we're spending all of our time supporting all these different... Basically, we're segmenting our community. We're segmenting our game by territory. I would argue that our time and our overhead is probably better spent making games that you guys want to play than making our whole entire ecosystem a mess. and what we're facing. And I know Medieval Madness right now is like the epicenter of this conversation.
    33:51
    But there's some things in there. And it's funny, like, is the F word, you know, the big F bomb, it's audible. Is that in the original ROM? Is that in the one that was added? Was it added later? That was added. Yeah, there's been plenty of discussion about that. That was one of those homebrew mods as opposed to the bleeped version, which is what came standard with the table. but I mean I think about also with like Elvira they even sent out what we basically call a modesty patch which was a sticker that would go over her cleavage on the back glass and I know that would absolutely send people into a tizzy too if that suddenly had to be applied but on the other hand as somebody pointed out yet we have a doom table we have alien isolation where she gets attacked by the alien and I don't know, I consider it blood being splattered on the screen, although it's just a red warning, more or less. And then you have The Walking Dead, where there's a mode where you're a sniper taking them out. So clearly there's room to have this happen. I guess what we're most curious about is, when these games came out, there was no ESRB. right is esrb's rule basically that if a game came with a family mode attached that that's what you have to apply no that that's not an esrb rule okay it's a rule that we are only allowing content that falls within our user rating because if we release it and it's outside of there we get a huge fine the game can be removed from the store i mean this is okay so okay right now we're playing it cautious we're investigating this fully how do we add our descriptors how quickly can it be done And what is the process to notify our existing customer base? We also need to run checks with our existing license holders. Like they, you know, I'm talking about Disney here. You don't want to tick off Disney.
    35:43
    Hey Disney, we did this by the way. I mean, I hope people understand the scope and the scale of what we're working at. This isn't just like we're sitting here, a couple of guys in a basement deciding we're going to release a game and we haven't thought about this stuff. I mean, believe me, it's not like, you know, there's a lot to do. So I, you know, I understand some people are going to are disappointed about it.
    36:05
    They think we're horrible. But one thing at a time, we're going to try to fix it all. We're going to try to make sure that, you know, you can play the regular mode in Medieval Madness. Maybe even like just put something, I don't know, recode the DMD. How crazy would that be? But you never know. I mean, this is why we wanted to bring it up, though, and kind of dive in. because some people do think it's just a wave of the – a push of a button and everything is well, and they don't think about the business side of things and how it affects everything else and literally becomes, well, would you like to have these games at all, or would you want to lose out completely on, like you said, the Disney license and what that would mean?
    36:47
    The last thing I can say maybe a little philosophically is just the world is changing at a pretty rapid pace. you know what's I hate what's politically correct what's there's just so many things and like games somehow become an epicenter of it and a focal point just because we're so polarized and it's such a progressive form of entertainment so these aren't easy decisions these aren't easy things to just do and it's like funny because every little we think of making all these small decisions but they add up and they add up very quickly and so it's just we're trying to do it right I mean, that's the only thing I can say is that we're trying to be – we're doing a lot of things here. We're just trying to do it all right. We're thinking about it. We're not just not thinking about it. So please understand.
    37:37
    Curious about what we're calling the Zen culture. There in the studio, obviously, you've got your designers who have been designing their own tables. and again I heard you mention that there was something like 40 employees that deal exclusively with the pinball aspect of Zen Studios are these table designers are they enjoying getting their hands dirty on these Williams machines or are they sticking to original designs and other people are dealing with them I just kind of curious to know how this is playing out Okay, all I can say is that everybody's living their dream right now.
    38:15
    You know, these guys, in Hungary, culture's a little different, history's quite different. Most of these guys grew up in a Russian-era communism, them. And pinball was a huge outlet for them. And pinball was something that was available. It's very special to them. It is their heritage. And so being able to work on these games is something special. It goes beyond just like making a game that someone's going to buy. It's just like very special for them. It's hard to describe unless you're there in our studio feeling this. But yeah, a lot of the, we're just letting people, everybody who wants to work on this can work on it. The machines are in our office. Some of them are Zen's personal collection. Some of them are from the Budapest Museum. We have access to every game. And yeah, we're taking them apart. They're working. They get to do this, the whole thing. We are making original tables still. We have a two table pack that's in production right now. That's two original Zen designs. And we'll be talking about that early next year. So we're going to maintain this thing where we're going to be making Williams Valley. We're also going to be still making Zen content. That's our original designs. and you'll still see licensed stuff from, I want to do all sorts of stuff, Stranger Things, Rick and Morty. So we have a lot. The team is there. It's established. It's multifunctional, super talented, multidimensional, all the cool words. I almost have to wonder if by being able to tear apart these machines and really look at them, I mean, especially when you look at a stripped play field, it often doesn't even look like the same game anymore. I'm wondering if this is also improving your designers' own skills when it comes to making original tables. Just seeing how these things work, you know, right down to the engineering with the mechanics.
    40:00
    Yeah, you're totally right. And actually, if you look at Zen, the early history and our early designs, I mean, you can automatically see where inspiration was taken from. So, you know, like Deep, he's our senior guy. He's the guy who did all the pro physics, you know. he's our he's our resident pinball expert in encyclopedia and um yeah he's just uh he's come such a long way um he could design a a machine he could design a real world game and uh you know likewise some of these classic designers steve richie's of the world and george goers are right now who's to say they couldn't do a um you know a video game based uh property from the ground up these are the most talented pinball designers in the world like it's really cool to work with them with uh regards to just that specifically with deep doing all the the physics there um you guys have obviously been taking a lot of feedback from us based off of the beta um and and applying certain things uh how much of of what we're telling you guys versus deep sitting there with a cabinet a real machine right next to him and being able to compare real physics uh How much play is there with that? You know, is it we take it into consideration, but then we also have this, you know, right in front of us and we can see it for ourselves kind of deal?
    41:21
    We take everything into consideration. We have no ego. And we, you know, we, yeah, we just, the funny thing is, like, every game feels different, you know? Yeah. Like, pinball is just the same across the board. I don't know you play Niana Jones and you play Fishtails and you play Champion Pub like they're all going to like it just feels different so again it's not this blanket code across every game is going to have its specific things so I think that's why we want the we're working on so many games it's possible maybe he missed something or like you know some very some of the tricks and some of the mechanics it's just like hey this needs to be tuned a little bit and like we'll take that feedback hey Deep a user mentioned And Fishtail's, like, you know, the flick pass is, like, feels a little weak or a little strong. He'll go in and look at the math and geometry, and he'll actually analyze it and say, yeah, you're right. Okay, let's tweak it. So we do it. Okay. Because I know that we were, there was obviously a big discussion about nudging. It's still an ongoing discussion about the strength of it. And it was one of those things where somebody brought it up. hey, if I have the ball trapped on the flipper and I nudge my table upward, I'm lucky if I get the ball up an inch, whereas currently I can bump it up a good six inches on the Zen table. So sure enough, I went out to my machine, because I have an A-ball deluxe, and did that, and immediately it was a slam tilt, and I didn't get it more than a half an inch off the flipper. And I went, well, this is the very exact same thing that the guys at Zen could be doing too, but people that have only predominantly played digital pinball and I don't have much real world experience would not necessarily like. And so that's where I'm wondering what is the extent of doing what is real world possible versus what kind of people expect out of their digital pinball? Maybe it's a combination of both. And I'll just say our mindset is we want to get as real close to the real thing as possible, but the real thing is the real thing for a reason. and you look at the history now of how much how many years have been spent working on on williams valley uh video game you know uh digital representations of the real machines and why don't we have it perfect yet um you know it's like uh i don't know i mean there's always going to be debate there's always going to be people who say this doesn't play real this does play real who knows if the actual question will ever be fully answered and we'll just say yes now it is perfect don't touch it again I don't know it does make sense I mean because we've even mentioned in real life both Jared and I's nemesis is Creature from the Black Lagoon and the main issue is that I've never played two that play alike and within my pinball league that I play in because we go to people's houses and played their personal collections and at least four of them own creature. And those four, none of them play the same. So you realize that just, yeah, there's so much variance that can even, that's a really good point. Thank you for bringing that up. Hey, at the end of the day, are we having fun? Are we playing together? Does it feel like, like the good times are here? You know, you know, I understand some, some people just get like hung up on the, the boss is not moving so precisely right here. We have guys who work on that all the time, but I'm really happy that right now it feels like it feels good. It feels like the real thing.
    44:57
    We'll continue to take the feedback. We're not going to have an ego about it. We're not going to say Zen's right, you're wrong, but we're going to work on a game, and everyone just has to know that we're responsive and that we're listening, and we want it to be as perfect as possible. Are we going to expect basically the same pattern of release that Zen has been doing all along, which is essentially 12 to 16 tables a year, 16 being a really high number for you guys and 12 being more kind of baseline where it's like every three months we get another pack. Is that kind of what we were going to expect, or is it going to be even more because of having Williams and original tables possibly dropping? Yeah. We feel like we're a little under the gun right now, so we're like really, really cranking it up. One of the things about Zen studio culture is I don't like to work in crunch.
    45:43
    The PFX three days were really hard on the team. I'm happy that this year we didn't have to work like that. I want my guys to have families. I want my guys to have lives.
    45:55
    The game industry is notorious for being brutal and burning people out and not being friendly like that. Zen's culture, we are Zen. We don't live like that. We don't operate like that.
    46:05
    The way that we can get more tables out, one, is become more efficient, which we're doing all the time. and we are a little faster with these Williams Valley tables than we are with our original ones. So that's good news. That allows us to get more out.
    46:18
    If this thing really goes the way that it has potential, it becomes a business decision at Zen, and I can bring more people to the pinball team. We're a larger company now. We have four teams at Zen all making pinball. It's one of our four projects, but it is the largest project, no question. But we're making other games. and some of those guys we rotate on some guys have been on pinball forever like they just love it they do it and never leave some guys want to make a couple pinball games a year and do something else so we let them rotate but hey if we need to we can bring more people to the pinball team we can crank out more games and that you know again that kind of goes back to the response to what happens when we launch tables so in other words folks buy lots of the tables Zen will increase in size and produce more tables for you to buy lots more of and then they get big and big and become EA.
    47:10
    I think you're talking rocket science. Why don't we go ahead and talk a little bit about this Star Wars pack, and basically your Star Wars tables in general. We've had many years of Star Wars table releases,
    47:27
    and, I mean, truthfully, the tables, not every single one of the tables in Zen is produced, but quite a lot of the tables of Zen has produced, I would take any day as being better designed than what we've got in the real world.
    47:44
    I agree with that, too. You've really put thought into these. But one of the questions that pops up a lot, and it started, obviously, originally with the first Zen tables. You guys did not get voice cast. But I'm listening to the solo table, and I'm wondering, are those the actual actors? Did you get sound-alikes? because conversely, on other tables, you guys have gotten the actual voice cast, like, say, for Aliens, but then you didn't have the music. So obviously there's cost involved in getting both music and voice, but I'm wondering how that works with the Star Wars tables now.
    48:21
    Yeah, with Star Wars, none of them are the actors from the films. Okay. I'm sorry, it's unrealistic.
    48:30
    Especially the modern-day stuff. actors are smart enough these days their agents control everything and if you want it the amount of money they're talking about they're paid very well for a reason so we do have Disney approved voice actors these are all union guys these are all very professional voice actors for anything that we're doing these days I know like Tom Kane did the voice of Lobot which is pretty special back on our Spiderman table like Yuri Leventhal did Spider-Man, and he just voiced for Insomniac's Spider-Man game. So we're using upper echelon, like best quality talent that we can get. For these tables in particular, the new Star Wars games, yeah, these are like the guys that would be voicing Star Wars animated shows or other Star Wars games. So quality is up there. Now, obviously, with Star Wars, you actually got the actual Star Wars music. Correct. And I know, again, music licensing is just beyond expensive and a bear. Did you guys kind of buy a pack of Star Wars music that then you just extended, you know, just reuse table to table? Are you constantly having to repurchase new music for these tables?
    49:47
    No, we've got a deal in place. There's three different parties that control the Star Wars music. We've got a deal, you know, a long-term deal, which is with the extent of the Star Wars. It's all lined up. Yeah, yeah. The IP, we've got the music, we've got all the various aspects. And, yeah, it's a collection of music, and we're able to use that as we need for the Star Wars universe. Okay. Also, what was unique about this release is instead of being timed for the theatrical release, you have it timed for the home video release. Did that kind of allow you guys to design the tables without having to worry about spoilers? because I know that that can be an issue where the studio is like, well, we don't really want you to have full information on the script because we don't want spoilers getting out and then you don't get designs, whereas now it would be kind of like you have more of a lead time to be able to see everything you could put into the tables themselves. Yeah, I could give you a big answer here. It might be interesting. I don't know. Do you want – I love licensing questions. Yeah, big answers. Let's go, Steve. Okay. So actually the solo pack in particular took a lot longer than our normal cycle for development for many reasons. But, you know, we've been day and date with film a few times. It's really painful. It's very, very difficult to do that on a production standpoint because movies changing all the time. Some lines that we some dialogue that we thought might be final actually gets changed. Colors of costumes, movements of characters, actual storylines. So we've kind of shifted our approach to try not to be day and date with film. It's just too risky that we're going to miss a release date or that something's going to change. And then it just we have to go all the way back through the submission process again. And it hurts our life. You know, our production team, our producers over at Disney. Right. Again, so this is better for us to try to time our stuff around a home entertainment release or something. If it's massive and evergreen like Star Wars, then it can be, you know, we found a good window for it. And there's lots of opportunities. May 4th, there's celebration. There's big events. And so, yeah, that's kind of the approach that we're taking now because film stuff is just very difficult to do. Man, we did it really well with, like, Guardians of the Galaxy and Force Awakens, but it's so painful. It's like, you know, it's just better to go this way. We were able to take our time. We don't have to worry about spoilers. We can do our press cycle the way it's supposed to be run. maybe we're not competing with the movie you know in terms of visibility and just chatter and stuff so a lot of reasons a lot of things that you think about when you decide when you're going to launch a game and especially being on movie content I'm really proud of this pack I love working with the Lucasfilm guys because they push us to explore areas of the Star Wars universe that other people aren't paying attention to or aren't exploring we're actually one of the very first real dedicated Lando content in games, which is super cool. The Lando table, you guys dip into the novels that came out way back when. I mean, I was really shocked to see that. I was like, wow, I remember reading that when I was 12.
    53:02
    It was just kind of impressive where you went with that. Yeah, the comic books, the novels, you know, it is your living... I don't want to do spoilers, but yeah, there's a bunch of Chronicles. That's why it's called Rezion Chronicles. You know, it's like, it's not just a linear thing, and you get to play different stories, and it's, man, it's really cool. It's seriously got style. Like, I love the color palette. I love everything about it. It's really great. With your Marvel tables, they,
    53:31
    now correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression has always been you guys had to deal more with the comics as opposed to the movies, and yet some of your artwork reflected the movies.
    53:41
    Like, say, for instance, Ant-Man really reflects the movie, but it doesn't necessarily seem tied to the movie, seems more tied to comic.
    53:51
    Is that kind of how that works with your Marvel tables, or are you trying to kind of inch towards more being the Marvel cinematic universe? Yeah. Well, we kind of did some one-offs there based on films, and that was at the direction of Marvel. They came to us and said, hey, we've got a movie coming. Can we get a game around it? And we took a look at it, and we're like, of course. and so yeah, some of those are kind of one-offs but the majority of our early stuff was definitely just based on the comic universe.
    54:20
    There's a movie now in the MCU. That's its own special thing. Because I know that it was one of those things where it was like A, I'm shocked that we didn't get a Black Panther table, but I knew exactly why we didn't get an Infinity Wars table because we already had Infinity Gauntlet which basically covered all that material. Same thing with Thor Ragnarok. We already had World War Hulk, which essentially covered that content. So it was kind of different figuring out, oh, is that a potential Zen table, or is it, no, they've already kind of covered it with previous tables that they've done. That the MCU is following what Zen was doing in Pinball.
    55:01
    Because again, we were listening to our players, what they wanted, and it's like Marvel must have just been doing the same thing. And it takes longer to make a movie than a game. or a pinball table I should say but it's yeah that's really funny right have you guys ever thought of doing sequels to some of your tables like you know take for instance Sorcerer's Lair it's very popular have you ever thought of doing a Sorcerer's Lair 2 I'm writing that down because no I don't think we have because I know that I mean with some of your early Marvel tables it would be wonderful to see you know like take Spider-Man And the one that you guys did is your typical Green Goblin and the typical villains that we're used to. But now we've got so many new villains that we've been introduced to, and everything is like, oh, I'd love another Spider-Man table.
    55:52
    Spider-Man is not actually a 3D character on the table, which is really funny to me. Yeah, it's true. I would love to redo Iron Man. I feel like I always go back to we learned so much from the Iron Man game, especially we learned how to make tables more accessible because like Ultimo comes up out of the middle of the table and 0.2% of the people that played that game have ever seen Ultimo. I've seen it once and I played the crap out of that. It's such a cool moment. And I feel like, man, we should do Iron Man again. We should just like redo the whole thing. I saw him literally for 10 seconds because I was so like, what the heck is that that the balls drained on me? Yeah. Yeah, right? You finally get there and you see it happen, you freak out and you lose. Yeah.
    56:40
    Hey, Matt, I've got a question for some of the folks who aren't actually on Steam at the moment, and this specifically relates to mobile.
    56:49
    But this would have been me if I hadn't actually got a Steam-capable computer because I was been watching a lot of the the steam fun that Chris was having for a while from the sidelines so I just wondering if you could go into a bit more detail about how the mobile customers are going to be looked after for the Williams Pinball collection. Yeah. Just to make it clear, Williams tables are coming to mobile. It's confirmed. We're coming to mobile. We're not coming to Zen Pinball, to the Zen Pinball app that you all know today.
    57:23
    That game was Zen Pinball hit the App Store. 2011? I don't even remember. It's not optimal right now. It's not a good game experience. We're still releasing tables there, but we're going to give you guys something much better for Williams, and we'll make specific announcements about that, hopefully here in the near future. If you've played any of our other standalone games in the more recent time, like Aliens vs. Pinball or Bethesda Pinball on mobile, you can see where our mobile games are going, and that's what you have to look forward to.
    57:56
    That's great. So that answers the question about there are some technical barriers with the current batch of mobile games that just prevent you from doing it at this stage. We want to make a landmark mobile experience. I mean, that's what we're going to go after here. That's really good. I know we'd be remiss if we didn't ask a question for our cabinet support people. A lot of people are wondering, is there going to be full cab support like the regular STEM tables have with the Williams tables? and kind of leading into that, it winds up being questions about the back glass. I know currently with the Zen tables, people are having to find their own back glass images. There's not an actual official automatic back glass that pops up with the Zen tables. And so they're kind of wondering, oh, are we going to have to do the same thing with Williams? and then in conjunction with that, would you guys have animated back glasses for the Williams tables? Okay. So, yeah, the current cabinet feature set on Steam is going to be applied to the Williams Valley tables, so it's going to work the same way it does now.
    59:03
    There's a lot of work we need to do on cabinets. Our works right now on cabinet mode over the last time, some of you guys may have seen like Pinball FX Championship Edition units showing up on various locations. We're getting ready for a pretty major thing with cabinets. And so the work is in progress. I think cabinet mode can be a lot better on Steam. It can be a lot better out in public locations. It's something that I think is very exciting. I think it's a form factor that shows the game off in a very special way and just captures people and brings them into the FX3 universe, will make them a pinball player. It could be our platform for major e-sport competition.
    59:49
    And so it's very important to us. Cabinets and cabinet mode and all of this, it's a huge potential. It's a big thing that we're looking at. We've been working on it for a while.
    59:59
    I guess the hardest thing with a lot of the cabinets is that it's almost like the PCs. There's so many different types of cabinets and so many different hardware configurations out there that getting a one-size-fits-all solution for these cabinet fans is actually really quite a challenge, I'd imagine. It's really difficult. PC gaming is changing. It changes all the time. And, like, new graphics cards, new screens, resolutions,
    60:26
    people with different monitors, the whole bit. I think what we can do is try to give more control to the specific player and give you guys more tools to tailor the experience to whatever it is you're playing on. And look, we love that we've, I mean, we kind of like spurned this whole thing. There was a huge argument in Zen whether or not we should turn on cab features back in the day. But we had so many requests, and I just wanted to help the DIY community. I love these garage projects that people are sending us pictures of. And then, of course, we had to go and we had to check, is this a new platform or since it's PC-based? Again, does it work with our licenses? Can't just start releasing licenses on some other thing that's a whole other business model that other people are profiting from? and believe me, these people pay attention and they deserve to. It's their property. So, again, it's not just a push of a button kind of thing. Like a lot of these things we're talking about, I'm glad we can talk about them and I can maybe hopefully share a little bit of the detail and what's happening with it. Yeah, that's really good. And how about VR? Obviously, there's Pinball Facts 2 VR with, I think, what, you guys have 12 tables out for that currently? Something like that. People are wondering, are they going to be seeing Williams tables in VR? at some point. Yeah, I gotta say, I was a little surprised. Maybe I shouldn't have been, but how many people want to play these in VR? It's really cool. I love playing pinball in VR.
    61:46
    Once you experience that, it's just a whole other dimension. And I think I was talking about this the other day, and I was talking with Akos on our live stream, but you can just think about your favorite game and then think about it in VR. The theme coming to life and an atmosphere around it that makes you feel like you are inside the experience. it's so cool. It takes a lot of work. Again, it's not like we develop the assets from the ground up for this. Um, and, uh, for each table, we'd have to go back and we'd have to read it. We'd work on everyone from the ground up and we'd package it together and we'd publish the whole thing again. And, um, if there's, there's demand for it, we can do it. VR, I think is growing. Uh, it's a, it's a category that I think people maybe have dismissed already, but it's progressively getting bigger and there's bigger and better games and better experiences. So the business side is viable. Again, it comes back to think about all the things we've talked about during this discussion in my team and what are we prioritizing and what's most important and checking them off one at a time, you know, challenge. I know that you commented on the Twitter and then I wound up commenting on it, but Jeremy Williams created his own flipper stand, if you will, with an analog plunger, and he had an accelerometer for doing nudging on it and whatever. It's this incredible small little compact box, and he was using it specifically for VR. And I thought to myself, oh, my God, if I could have that box and just play regular 2D on my PC, But with that box, that'd be so incredible because then you're really doing flipper buttons and you're really being able to feel the nudge. And it's so much smaller than having a full cabinet. I was just like, oh, I would kill if somebody would just put that to market. It's like too bad Red Octane isn't still around. You know, back when they were doing DDR dance pads and doing all the Guitar Hero stuff. I don't know if you know my history. I was I was an early part of that. Oh, my God. I have a lot of experience with peripherals. Yeah. We have one of Jeremy's boxes in our office.
    63:57
    All right, cool. Wow. Yeah, that would be, for me, ideal. It would be incredible to have that. Because I'm not ready to dive into the VR.
    64:08
    It's a little hard on my eyes, specifically, because you can never quite get the resolution as crystal clear as you want it to be when you're reading text. But on the other hand, when I've tried it out, oh, my God, So it's so visceral that I literally tried to put the controller down on top of the glass and then drop the controller to the floor.
    64:29
    There's another one, Pool Arcade VR. It's a Billiards game. Okay. Oh, it's so awesome. It felt so real to me. I thought I was leaning on the pool table and I fell out of my chair.
    64:46
    I know what you're talking about. Yeah. I do guess that that's definitely the appeal of VR. Once you've tried it and experienced it, then you realize how amazing it is. It's almost like back when you guys had Plants vs. Zombies available as a table. And when I saw it, whenever I tried playing it, it visually just never made any sense to me. Then I went over to a friend's house that had a 3D TV, and this was back on the PS3 days, and he showed it to me in 3D. and that table, it was just like, oh, oh, this is what, and it completely made sense. My game was so much better. And that's kind of the leap that happens when you throw on VR, where it just becomes this real object. You can look underneath the table. You can, like, you can move yourself all the way into it. You can see all the things going on. I mean, yeah, it's really, really neat. It's great technology.
    65:41
    Yeah, I definitely want to do more. Jared, do you have any last questions? we the scary part mel we didn't even crack the surface of how many questions we had posted to us from uh people on the forum is there anything jared that you want to uh highlight i think i've hit everything that i wanted to i'm i'm frantically scrolling through the list i think we we've i think we've covered up um most of the stuff um oh i i had a question i don't know if you can actually go into this we we have an idea of how long it took farsight to actually strip a table and actually get it to the point where they had a flipping digital version of it. How long do you find that it's taking to actually do this process now?
    66:24
    It's a little different. I might not be the best person to answer that. So all this work is going on in Budapest. I'm not here in California, as you know. I was just there two weeks ago, actually, and they were taking apart a game that's going to be in a future release. And, yeah, I was kind of asking them. it was crazy how many pieces there were and I'm sitting there watching them do it and it's very methodical and then they get done and I'm looking across and I'm just like how are you guys going to put that back together again you know and it takes some time and you take all the pieces and you model them and then you get the artwork going and you get the game up and running and you put it all together and now we're doing the remaster version and you know the different physics.
    67:10
    Like I said earlier, I think, because we've just completed our first round here, I think it's a little bit less time than it takes us to do our original tables.
    67:20
    Once we've done a few more, I'll probably have a better idea. It's all about efficiency, but I thought we did pretty good this first time through. We gave ourselves plenty of time. I'm not going to give you specific, but it's a little bit shorter than our original process as it should be. We don't have to write rule sets. We don't have to create everything from scratch.
    67:41
    Well, not only that, but eventually you're going to have certain assets that repeat table to table, you know, whether it's star posts or pop bumpers and stuff like that. So, I mean, those will then be just part of your digital library that you'll be able to dump on a table real quick without having to model it brand new every single time. Yeah. Hey, the other thing I was going to ask, too, not that I'll ever be able to experience, of course, because I don't think I'm going for a flight over to Budapest anytime soon, But what can folks expect when they go for the studio tour over there? Yeah, this is really cool. I'm excited to essentially open our doors to players who want to come and hang out. They're going to come into Zen. They're going to get a welcome. They're going to get a full studio tour. There may or may not be a room that's locked and blacked out for that. And then we're going to we're kind of putting together like a presentation of sorts that one of our lead designers is actually going to give. and it'll walk you through the process of doing the Williams Ballet tables and production and stuff. And then we have a lot of machines in our office. They'll just be turned on. We can play, have some games. And then, you know, probably we're talking about an hour tour.
    68:50
    Probably if you're there on a Friday, it's going to turn into longer because it's Friday afternoon or something. We're going to give you a ticket to the Budapest Pinball Museum. And you can go down there and you can go hang out, and it's free entry on us. So that's kind of the general overview. That's pretty cool. Just getting the studios here alone I think will be really interesting for folks to experience. The museum itself sounds just amazing. It is really, really cool. We're going to be doing some events there. We're going to be doing some live streams. I can envision some announcements will be made from there at some point. It's kind of tone-based there for the Budapest guys. Right now Pacific Pinball Museum is kind of in my area here in Northern California. So expect us to be doing things at these locations. Yeah, it makes me think about, like I know out here in Banning where they have the 700-plus machines at the Museum of Pinball.
    69:44
    I know they have an event coming up in October, and then they have their Arcade Expo usually around March. I'm wondering, would we expect to see them there with your cabinets? Yeah, this is something that's a little different for us. it's been hard for us to do events just because of the logistics and the way our company is set up and who's here in California. We have a small team here. This team is growing with the sole purpose of being more hands-on, more on the ground, grassroots, being involved with the pinball community, being on-site at events, interacting, demo, just being a part of that. We're excited. This is fun. Being part of this real-world thing now, we can really jump in in a different way. So yeah, it's a little lead time there to get our schedule put together, get the team assembled, But, yeah, you can expect us to be showing up at events and locations like that. Because, you know, I'll tell you right now, I'm in Southern California and happy to, you know, help.
    70:40
    No, that would be like, you know, asking community involvement and help us out, you know. Well, Mel, you have been more than generous with your time with us today. We didn't expect to have you around this long in our podcast, and this has been fantastic. we've covered just an absolute ton of material questions that we've always wanted to talk to Zen about because the only other time we had got to talk with Zen was with the former community manager, Bobby Balam. And she wound up, at the time, I didn't have hardly any Zen tables on PC. She hooked me up with a whole bunch of codes. And from there, that snowballed into me buying everything else. So but unfortunately, as community manager, there's only so much that you can answer about what goes on. So this has been questions that we've had for years, just piling up, wanting to ask somebody that actually was in the know. So thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're in a special time and moment right now. So we're we're we make we're making the conscious decision to be open about stuff. We want people to know us. We want people to understand our process. I think that's important as we endeavor in this together is really the way we look at it. And like I said, this marathon.
    71:53
    So as much information as I can give you guys so you know what we're doing here, you know what our focus is. I think it'll help everybody here, again, have a good time playing these games together and just, like, you know, really enjoying life, enjoying the game. Yeah, I can't wait to set up some custom tournaments with these Williams tables, believe me. Oh, man, it's going to be so fun. Count me in. Count me so in.
    72:16
    All right. Well, folks, that is basically all the time we have for our podcast. Also, a couple of announcements. Next podcast, that'll be our 150th. Whether we do anything special, because we've only had three weeks in a row special, we'll come up with something. also want to give a shout out we had another generous donation dropped off this morning to us that helps us keep this podcast going and eventually might be able to afford us to buy software that would let us do like you know live audio drops and that sort of thing so we know who you are we thank you very much thank you so much for your support you are a legend and we are currently working on getting some new t-shirts available to you with our current logo going on.
    73:13
    And maybe we'll have that ready to go by next week. Who knows? Maybe that'll be our big thing. But we're working on that currently.
    73:20
    So yeah, beyond that, go check out our website. It is blockadepinball.com slash episodes. There you will find all of the previous episodes along with the timing notes that Jared spends copious amounts of time putting together. and they keep on getting more and more spectacular, so make sure you check those out. Make sure if you have questions for us that you don't feel like asking us on Twitter and you don't feel like personal messaging us on digital pinball fans, you can always drop us an email. It is blahblahblockade at gmail.com.
    73:55
    Regarding that other stuff, on Twitter, the show is at Blockade. I am at ShutYourTraps. He is at JaredMorgz. anything I've missed, Jared?
    74:05
    I think you've got all the socials covered off there. Just wanted to also give a final shout out to all the new YouTube followers. We've had a huge uptick in subscribers on YouTube. So welcome. Thanks for watching. And let us know what you think of the show if you're new to it. And you know what, folks? Do yourself a favor. Go check out on YouTube Spacey's Arcade. He doesn't always talk pinball, but his last few episodes have been specifically about the uh williams zen stuff and he does a lot of really great comparisons between uh visual pinball real pinball uh pinball arcade and what zen's been doing and uh it's quite interesting to see some of the visual you know like when you talk about it or when you read it in print you're not quite understanding maybe what's being said as opposed to when you see it visually happening in front of you and go oh yeah that's that thing So definitely go check out his YouTube and see what's going on in the videos there, too. Yeah, absolutely.
    75:08
    All right. Well, I guess we'll pull the plug, Jared. Yeah, I think we've definitely talked well and truly long enough today. I'm exhausted. So thanks again to Mel Kirk, Vice President of Publishing over at Zen. And, folks, we'll see you all again next week. Bye-bye.
    75:26
    See you later. wizardamusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter rods easy to install, totally unique mention Blockade Podcast for 10% off your order wizardamusement.com sales, restoration, customization don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blockade is delivered to we can't improve unless you tell us how now stop listening and play some pinball
    75:58
    We'll be right back.